Linux Foundation Announces R Consortium to Support Millions of Users Around the World

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jun 30, 2015) - The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced the R Consortium. This new organization will strengthen both the technical and user communities as a Collaborative Project hosted at Linux Foundation.

The R language is used by statisticians, analysts and data scientists to unlock value from data. It is a free and open source programming language for statistical computing and provides an interactive environment for data analysis, modeling and visualization. The R Consortium will complement the work of the R Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Austria that maintains the language. The R Consortium will focus on user outreach and other projects designed to assist the R user and developer communities.

Founding companies and organizations of the R Consortium include The R Foundation, Platinum members Microsoft and RStudio; Gold member TIBCO Software Inc.; and Silver members Alteryx, Google, HP, Mango Solutions, Ketchum Trading and Oracle.

"Millions of data scientists and academic researchers use R language every day and want to collaborate with their peers to share visualization and analysis techniques," said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. "The R Consortium will promote the sharing of ideas and accelerate findings that make R even better for business, research and academic purposes."

The R user community is vibrant with local user groups organized all over the world. The R Consortium will work with this user community and the R Foundation to amplify and focus the impact of this global community in order to advance the project for all users and developers, including millions more in the coming years.

"This is a great opportunity to harness the power of the thriving R user community around the globe and advance the R language for everyone," said John Chambers on behalf of the R Foundation Board. "The R Consortium will provide vital funding support for R services and development, made possible by the Linux Foundation's proven track record of bringing large-scale communities together. We are looking forward to working with both organizations."