Will your investment in R become worthless? Will R still exist and be maintained ten years from now? Is it foolish to rely on the whims of the open source community, instead of the profit-maximizing motives of commercial software companies and developers? My money is on R.
Recognize that in order to survive, a commercial software company must get you to pay every year or two, typically by inducing you to upgrade. These induced upgrades sometimes occur because there are new valuable features that you are willing to pay for, but often they occur because the company deliberately creates incompatibilities between old and new versions, or refuses to fix bugs in old versions. It is probably obvious to you that in many cases there is no functional need to reinvent software and operating systems every few years. Consider Microsoft Office. In terms of features, most users would find Office 97 completely adequate. Nevertheless, you must upgrade: "This new version is wonderful and has a shiny new file format and new features. (Note: It will destroy your old documents and ruin compatibility with coauthors who haven't upgraded. Too bad.)" But if Microsoft didn't create incompatibilities, users might not upgrade.
Moreover, in many arenas, open source software has been hugely successful. Linux is widely used for powering websites, datacenters, and by the research community for high-performance computing clusters (for example, the 7,000 CPU cluster at Northwestern runs Linux). Linux is also the basis for Google's Android, which has become the dominant smartphone operating system. The open source Apache and Nginx webservers run on 67% of all domains and 72% of the million busiest sites globally, compared to 11.3% and 13.3% for Microsoft. MySQL, an open-source relational database program, is used by Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, and in many other applications. Numerous widely-used and important programming languages are open source, freely available, and widely used, among them Perl, Python, and PhP.
Open source can be commercialized: Companies can base a business on open source software by selling support or enhanced (partially closed-source) versions of the software. Red Hat, Canonical, Suse, and Oracle offer commercial versions of Linux along with support. Oracle sells an enhanced version of MySQL. Revolution Analytics offers a commercial, enhanced version of R, and Rstudio sells training and support for R. The fact that the underlying software is open source constrains bad behavior by the commercial firm. In addition, commercial companies often find they have to support successful open source projects. R, for example, is supported by both Mathematica and SAS.
Will your investment in R pay off? No one can say for sure, but it's not a bad bet.
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