As foreshadowed on Twitter yesterday, a new R Consortium of major vendors launched today aimed at "strengthen[ing] both the technical and user communities," according to a Linux Foundation announcement.

Founding members include Microsoft, Google, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, along with well-known R players such as RStudio, Tibco Software and Mango Solutions (Revolution Analytics is a member under the Microsoft umbrella). Alteryx and Ketchum Trading are also founding members.

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The consortium's home at the Linux Foundation may ease some R users' worries that major vendors could disrupt the open and collaborative spirit that now exists throughout much of the R community.

"The R Consortium will complement the work of the R Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Austria that maintains the language," according to this morning's announcement. "The R Consortium will focus on user outreach and other projects designed to assist the R user and developer communities."

“We've got over a thousand Googlers using R, and it is critical to many projects,” Tim Hesterberg, senior quantitative analyst at Google, was quoted as saying in the announcement. “We love that it is open source, so we can connect to our internal data processing tools. We're happy to support the R infrastructure as part of the R Consortium.”

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