R is a popular programming language and environment that is free of charge and widely used for both statistical software development and data analysis. Not only does R provide an extensive variety of statistical and graphical techniques, it is also designed to be relatively easy to use, thanks in part to the availability of user-created packages stored on the Comprehensive R Archive Nework ( CRAN). R packages allow researchers with or without programming knowledge to organize, code, and report data in a systematic way for sharing and public archiving. Such packages are also indicative of the power of R as an open and free analytic platform. So how did it all begin?
Before R came the S language, a different statistics software project developed by John Chambers and colleagues at Bell Laboratories in 1976. S was meant to be an accessible data analysis tool for researchers, but was not an open-source project and ultimately failed to generate broad interest. R was eventually created as a different implementation of S. Developed by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the Univerisy of Aukland in New Zealand, R was meant to provide an open source route to participation in statistical research methodology first made accessible by S. It has since grown substantially in users and contributors.
For more information on the inspiration behind R and the differences between R and S, see Ross Ihaka’s 1998 paper, R: Past and Future History.
In 1995, Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentlemen made the R source code available by ftp under the terms of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License, making it a free and open-source software. Anyone is freely licensed to install and use R, and its source code is openly shared in order to encourage people to voluntarily improve its design. According to Ihaka, the decision to make R free software has enabled them to set higher goals since it has given them access to such a large group of talented people who are willing to invest significant effort into it. Indeed, R has become a mature and valuable tool, and its continued development is supported by the R Foundation and the larger R development communuity.
References
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/html/interface98-paper/paper_2.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html