RStudio Became Posit PBC Yesterday - Here's Why I Think That's Good News

Composition

I joined RStudio five years ago, at the time the company was best known for the RStudio IDE, as well as a few R-centric projects.?

But, today when I think of what Posit does, I think;

? RStudio IDE - My favorite place to do data science.?

? tidyverse/r-lib - A team of developer data scientists supporting dozens of my go-to R packages, plus doing much else.

? tidymodels/Vetiver - A framework for modeling and ml, using tidyverse principles. Including Vetiver for MLOps.?

? Shiny - My favorite tool for building dashboards & interactive visualizations. Shiny for python is an exciting new project under this team.

? Quarto & R Markdown - My favorite tools for analytics notebooks and publishing, whether that's in R or Python.?

? TF/Torch/Spark with the Posit AI Team.?

? Professional products like Workbench, Package Manager and Connect help data science teams work in complex environments common in enterprises, large and small.?

? Many other projects; to name a few more; gt is a popular tool for making tables, Siuba is a dplyr port for python, chartnine a port of ggplot2 for python, Academy offers workshops to enterprise data science teams.?

? There are more than 40 full-time engineers at Posit focused just on open source software, plus many more working at least partly developing or otherwise supporting the projects above, and other OS tools. Dozens of educators & content makers help folks make use of the best open source tools & methods in our field.?

Positiveness

Posit is a Public Benefit Corporation, focused on "creating free and open-source software for data science, scientific research, and technical communication." The leadership here talks a lot about doing what is necessary to become an enduring "100 year" enterprise, paying costs early-on to lay the foundation to become a dependable institution in our field, supporting great free and open source tools for scientific research for the long term.?

As a side note: On face-value, I don't give much credibility to a company's mission statement. How much trust should you put into a statement from a legal entity with a charter and lots of case law that basically forces them to maximize value for their shareholders over others? How much trust can you put into the statements of people who have obvious conflicts of interest (myself included)? The following goes part of the way in assuaging?me; If you're at least tangentially familiar with VC financing and valuations for data science firms in the past decade – and how being a privately-held PBC might cut into that –?I hope you can get a sense of the considerable financial opportunity costs the founders, early investors, and leadership at RStudio have paid to make Posit PBC a reality, and stay committed to that mission. It blows my mind how well folks here have steered the ship so that from the level of corporate governance down to the teams and projects they invest in, they are really laying down that foundation for Posit to make a positive and enduring impact on how people get science done.

Positioning?

Right, but what about the name? RStudio is the name of the IDE, but RStudio PBC, the company, strove to do so much more, and is unconstrained by supporting one language, framework, or set of technologies. RStudio hasn't been particularly monogamous with R for a few years, but some continue to think our love for other technologies is constrained. Continuing to call the company RStudio has demonstrably been a point of confusion for some people. While that in-and-of-itself isn't a particularly big issue, it genuinely seems to have created a mental block for some in the adoption of our tooling. RStudio, as a company name, made sense when we focused on making the best "Studio" to do your R projects (and I think it still is!), but not so much when you think about all the other teams and projects succeeding here, and all the work we want to do.

With this in mind it makes sense to change the name. Posit as a name captures in as few characters as possible what we're trying to do. It shares the same entomological root as some other classy words.

TL:DR I'm generally ??????????ive about the whole thing.

* Side note, if it's not clear, I work at Posit PBC and the opinions above are my own.?

** Final Side Note: I promise to stop using Posit as an ex??????????ory tool in any future posts. It’s lazy, leads to malposition, and is rarely apposite.