As we noted in this post, one of the open source-focused companies that made a big splash at the recent OSCON conference was REvolution Computing. The company champions the use of R, an open source language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. R is used by many researchers when parallel processing of statistical data can help sift and analyze large amounts of information. We discussed what it's capable of at length in this post, and here are some of the new directions REvolution Computing and R are going in.

My apologies to "The Highlander" franchise (except for "The Quickening," which I'll never mention again -- ever) for not accepting the "there can be only one" approach for every aspect of my life. And to bMighty's Matthew McKenzie, I owe a giant round of applause and thanks for stating quite eloquently something I've been thinking about for some time but have been unable to tame into a post.

McKenzie discusses the importance -- or relative lack thereof -- of Net Application's revelation last month that Linux surpassed 1% of the operating system market share. While statistics has the unique distinction of being an area of mathematics that doesn't flat-out discourage creativity in calculation, and the gathered data depends as much on where it is collected as how it is interpreted -- I feel he's right in his conclusion it's not a win, or a loss, or even terribly indicative of a trend.

Framed in the "overall marketshare" terminology, the information (or how it was gathered and calculated) isn't necessarily questionable, it's more that it's meaningless. It's nebulous, even when one looks at several months worth of data. I agree with McKenzie that Freeform Dynamics' look at how Linux is used in various business settings answers an actual question -- and the answer can be used to ask further questions, form opinions -- and maybe one day even explain to some degree what 1% of the market share really means.

If you work with statistics, then you should look at R, an open-source language for statistical analysis. It's jam-packed with features, and has a strong community that offers both assistance and numerous extension packages.

When people talk about big, successful open-source projects, they often think about software that can be used in large organizations. So we hear a great deal about the Linux operating system, the MySQL database, and even Ruby on Rails as a framework for developing Web applications. There's more to the story, though.