SAS Language Clone Now Free for Commercial Use

This article is originally published at http://r4stats.com

The WPS Analytics’ version of the SAS language is now available in a Community Edition. This edition allows you to run SAS code on datasets of any size for free. Purchasing a commercial license will get you tech support and the ability to run it from the command line, instead of just interactively. The software license details are listed in this table.

While the WPS version of the SAS language doesn’t do everything the version from SAS Institute offers, it does do quite a lot. The complete list of features is available here.

Back in 2009, the SAS Institute filed a lawsuit against the creators of WPS Analytics, World Programming Limited (WPL), in the High Court of England and Wales. SAS Institute lost the case on the grounds that copyright law applies to software source code, not to its functionality. WPL never had access to SAS Institute’s source code, but they did use a SAS educational license to study how it works. SAS Institute lost another software copyright battle in North Carolina courts, but won over the use of their educational license. SAS Institute is suing a third time, hoping to do better by carefully choosing a pro-patent court in East Texas.

Although I prefer using R, I’m a big fan of the SAS language, as well as SAS Institute, which offers superb technical support. However, I agree with the first two court findings. Copyright law should not apply to a computer language, only to a particular set of source code that creates the language.

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This article is originally published at http://r4stats.com
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