SAS and Open Source Software

From sasCommunity

Although, when reading research on this topic, there seems not to be a clear picture on the extent on how much it currently is implemented or how much it additionally will be implemented in the coming years, it goes without saying that Open Source Software (OSS) is becoming more and more prominently used by companies. As for example can be read in the article "Penetration of Open Source Software in the Software Market" from Dennis Byron, analyst at EBizQ in which he references recent studies by Saugatuck Technologies and IDC. Here you can read, and I quote:
This article looks at the question “Who are leaders in open source software market penetration?” and even at how the idea of “leadership” should be calculated. ebizQ research finds IT users just want good software that doesn’t break often. And when it does, they want a substantial company available to fix it.

I am not an analyst but I am convinced that indeed OSS will increase their market share. Partially of course due to the fact that more and more major (both hardware and software) companies are buying into Open Source projects, but also because of the fact that I believe that the general concept and ideas behind OSS are getting more and more adopted and supported.There is even belief that a correlation can be made between the -- currently hot -- implementation of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Open Source, Linux in particular, as can be read in the article "Everything I need to know about SOA I learned from Linux"

Looking at our own company, albeit it relatively small, all our servers run Linux as an OS and over 50% of the employees have a Linux OS as main OS on their laptops and/or desktops. Due to the fact that not all SAS products run on Linux we of course also remain to have need for Windows as an OS. Thus we do have Windows available within Virtual Machines both on servers, laptops and/or desktops. So did I decide to start this blog simply to inform you of facts and/or (my) thoughts on OSS which most of us can also read from various sources on the internet? Or to indicate that our company does use OSS on our hardware?
No, not primarily. So, what did make me decide to start of this blog?

Basically there are two questions to which I am trying to find an answer:

• To what extend is OSS implemented within the SAS Community? Ideally maybe separated over two separate groups, end users of SAS software and programmers/consultants. And seperated into OS (which Linux distribution) or other OSS.
• To what extend will SAS increase its support for OSS both looking at integration on OS level (Linux) and software (like for example an add in for Open-Office)?.

Am I looking for these answers just out of curiosity? Not mainly.
Running Ubuntu as main OS on my laptop and on our company's servers we occassionnaly run into issues when trying to install and/or use SAS. Until now we have been able to overcome this issues by using information that we can find through searching the SAS Support site but additionally we also have had to make use of Linux forums since officially Ubuntu is not supported.
Getting an idea of the extend to which OSS/Linux is being used would give more insight and may justify a discussion to whether support for Linux should remain to just the few distributions that are currently officially supported. Would it maybe be better if support is provided on kernel release?
Additionally it could provide information that may justify that a specific forum and/or other mean of support could be useful to help out people running SAS and using OSS and/or Linux as an OS.

Although this may not be entirely the appropriate place, but hopefully also SAS developers are part of this community, I also hope to learn what the (un)official stance is of SAS towards OSS support and what sort of developments are currently taking place.
In line with the beliefs within the OSS community, realizing that I can solely speak for myself here, I am also prepared to offer support if required in helping improve support and development (in which I can solely offer readiness to test) of any SAS product within an Linux environment.

Please feel free to react to this article, by either

• "Discussing" this topic on my blog,
• leaving a reaction on my talk page or
• contacting me at rdrijsen@eom.nl

--Resa 08:34, 29 January 2008 (EST)