Insightful - R cooperation

["Al Wilkinson" <a44944@gmail.com>]

Hi - Seeing Insightful sponsor R events, open up access to R within their system, I'm wondering if this entails any risk to the development of R itself. I assume that R's core development team does what's best for R, but couldn't Insightful's influence prove to be a distraction at best? From an R user standpoint, why spend energy aligning both systems, if such a thing is actually being contemplated or even implemented?

Insightful promotes and sells a commercial product and has to see the ever growing pool of R users as the untapped ressource, by and large. Novell/MS/Linux etc... smacks of damage control in a sense, as does the Insightful/R case. Is it?

S+ and R engines are different, developement philosophy that drive both systems is clearly not aligned, and R could go on thriving even if Insightful went out of business tomorrow morning (probably thrive further?). Insightful is hard at work bridging to R, as SPSS, Statistica are too, incidently. But given S+/R's close original kinship and Insightful's commercial interests, wouldn't any promotion of the reverse be in R's detriment?

Just kicking the idea around. Maybe it's really to R's best. Thanks.

Al W.