Christian Ritter
Opportunities and requirements for open source/zero cost statistical
software in companies under permanent reorganization
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In companies under permanent reorganization, stable software environments
are hard or even impossible to maintain. Parts of the company break off
into joint ventures and licences need to be split, mergers occur implying
mixed software cultures, and the market moves towards Microsoft-like
installation and licencing: Centrally managed individual licenses instead
of floating licenses for a defined number of concurrent users.

Since average usage time (usage time per employee) of statistical software
is very small compared to office tools (word processors, spreadsheets, etc.),
"global" availability of commercial statistical software is therefore not
economical. This means that even in companies in which a common commercial
statistical tool was available to everybody before, this will no longer be
the case in the near future. Access to commercial statistical software will
be limited to a pool of statisticians and para-statisticians. All others have
to live with what their spreadsheet offers.

I believe that now is a unique opportunity for imposing standardized
zero-cost/open-source software: This would allow global coverage, training,
and communication even under changing environment. The R-language holds the
potential to become such a solution. However, its lack of a GUI facilitating
elementary tasks and its insufficient integration into office tools (Microsoft,
Open Office, etc) make this currently impossible.

This abstract is essentially the content of the talk I gave at the DSC2003
session. In this paper, I shall describe my view of the status just after the
conference.