With today’s announcement that Microsoft will acquire Revolution Analytics, it is worthwhile to consider the commercial support that has existed in different forms throughout the history of this open source language. 

• R was based on S, which was initially developed by John Chambers at Bell Laboratories in the 1970s.

• R itself appeared in 1993 as a GNU open source project.

• RStudio was founded in 2008 and provides the amazing RStudio IDE.  They also successfully launched a number of commercial ventures since 2013.

• Since 2012, Oracle supported its own Enterprise Version of R.

• Since 2012, IBM has a library to support R scripts being run in IBM InfoSphere BigInsights.

• And again today, January 23, 2015,  Microsoft acquires Revolution Analytics. Microsoft had integrated with R in the past,  most notably its cloud based Azure ML Cloud support.

Besides these implementations, many major companies actively support development in the R community.

• Google has a well known R style guide reflecting internal use of the language.  They released CausalImpact: a package for estimating causal effects in time series in 2014.

• Twitter developers released a library for anomaly detection in 2014 as well.

• Revolution R has a more comprehensive list of companies that support R.   

The availability of R as an Open Source product is great.  It allows R to be easily introduced into new settings and quickly adopted by new users .   Microsoft’s acquisition of Revolution Analytics demonstrates that R continues to be highly valued within commercial enterprises.  And the ongoing support by developers and engineers within commercial settings continues to contribute to the value and applicability of the language.