{"id":876,"date":"2010-11-24T15:02:52","date_gmt":"2010-11-24T20:02:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/?p=876"},"modified":"2010-11-24T15:02:52","modified_gmt":"2010-11-24T20:02:52","slug":"hybrid-open-source-sas-or-what-are-friends-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/hybrid-open-source-sas-or-what-are-friends-for\/","title":{"rendered":"Hybrid Open-Source SAS – or what are friends for?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was reading this article in the Wall Street Journal on SAS software<\/a> and CEO Jim Goodnight said,<\/p>\n

“We’re producing so many new products. [They’re all] in the funnel and we’ve got to get them in production and it’s taking us longer to get them out the door\u2026. A lot of the problems are testing issues. It’s taking too long to solve all the problems. Every piece of software has its bugs. And with more and more products, we’re struggling with compatibility to make sure the next release is easy to migrate to for certain customers. With the sheer number of software solutions we have, it’s making it harder and harder to develop and test them all.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which got me to wondering why SAS does not take advantage of its considerable user base. In another article from CBR Business Intelligence, it’s claimed that SAS has 45,000 customer sites. <\/a>(Not that I’m stalking y’all or anything). I have no idea what the average number of users is at each site but let’s try a really low estimate of around 22. I say really low because I know that many of those sites are universities and corporations that have hundreds of users and it would take a heck of a lot of small shops to bring it down to 22, but let’s go with that. So, this gives them around a million users.<\/p>\n

You would think that somewhere in those million users you would have people who would be happy to dive in and break things (also known as testing). One benefit of open source software is that you have people trying things all the time. When they come up with problems, they create fixes. There are also disadvantages to open source software SOMETIMES –\u00a0 lack of documentation, lack of support. That’s not always true. Personally for large open source options, like Linux, the documentation is massive as is the support within the user community. There can also be legal issues if a company is marketing something and it has someone else’s code included.<\/p>\n

However, there is a hybrid option, that can happen on two fronts:<\/p>\n

1. Testing. <\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was at USC when we would get new versions of any software or operating system, there were several people (including me), who had the immediate reaction of ,<\/p>\n

“Let’s try to break it!” <\/em><\/p>\n

We’d install it on every configuration of virtual machine, hardware and operating system. We’d try to use enormous files and analyze huge matrices of dependent and independent variables. We’d compare results from different applications. Ostensibly we did this as part of our job so that when anyone asked us a question we had a better answer than,<\/p>\n

“Your guess is as good as mine.” <\/em><\/p>\n

There was also the aspect of, as one of my co-workers said,<\/p>\n

“They pay me to play with computers all day. How cool is that?” <\/em><\/p>\n

The fact is when you create a piece of software of a significant degree of complexity (and SAS is certainly on the far right of the bell curve) it is damn near impossible to test every possible permutation –<\/p>\n

“What if I run SAS on Linux running on VMWare on a Macbook to read a 100GB dataset that was orginally created by SAS on Windows in China using a double-bit character system and then exported using PROC COPY?”<\/p>\n

With a large enough user base, SAS could make copies of work in progress available for testing which would allow identification of problems. I can see many reasons that users would be happy to do this:<\/p>\n