Posit PBC

Posit PBC
FormerlyRStudio Inc, RStudio PBC
Company typePrivate
IndustrySoftware publishing and SaaS platforms
Founded2009; 15 years ago (2009)
Founder
HeadquartersBoston, Massachusetts, US
Key people
Products
Websiteposit.co

Posit PBC (or Posit) is an open-source data science software company. It is a public-benefit corporation[1] founded by J. J. Allaire,[2] creator of the programming language ColdFusion.

Posit has no formal connection to the R Foundation, a not-for-profit organization located in Vienna, Austria,[3] which is responsible for overseeing development of the R environment for statistical computing.

Posit was formerly known as RStudio Inc. In July 2022, it announced that it changed its name to Posit, to signify its broadening exploration towards other programming languages such as Python.[4]

History

RStudio logo with a white R surrounded by a blue circle
Former company logo when it was RStudio

Before the company started, Allaire initially started RStudio, the integrated development environment (IDE), as an open source project.[5] He recruited Joe Cheng to help work on this project, who would eventually become Posit's CTO.[6] Moreover, Cheng would conceptualize and develop the Shiny web framework in 2012.[7]

In August 2012, Hadley Wickham, Winston Chang, and Garrett Grolemund joined Posit (at the time RStudio Inc.). Wickham was known for working on packages such as ggplot2 and plyr. Chang was known for also working on ggplot2, and publishing the book R Graphics Cookbook. Grolemund was known for working on the lubridate R package, which makes working with dates and time data types easier.[8]

Hexagon logo for the software package Shiny
Shiny hex logo

In November 2013, Yihui Xie joined Posit to work on the Shiny package. He created the knitr, cranvas, and animation packages, among others.[9]

In November 2016, Jenny Bryan and Max Kuhn joined Posit. Bryan was an associate professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She worked on R packages like googlesheets and was part of the leadership team at rOpenSci, an organization to help develop more R tools for the scientific community. Kuhn, formerly senior director of nonclinical statistics at Pfizer and co-author of the book Applied Predictive Modeling, was hired to improve the statistical modeling capabilities in the tidyverse.[10]

In January 2020, it was announced that RStudio Inc. would be restructured to be a public benefit corporation, RStudio PBC. RStudio is privately held, and venture capital firm General Catalyst owns a minority stake in the company.[11]

In July 2022, it was announced at the annual company conference, rstudio::conf, that RStudio PBC will be renamed to Posit PBC. The name change was to signal an expansion in focus among its products and services beyond R, such as Python. Previously, the "RStudio" brand made it more difficult for Python users to convert to using their products.[12] Posit's commercial products were renamed Posit Connect, Posit Workbench, and Posit Package Manager.[13]

In November 2023, Wes McKinney, creator of the Python package pandas, joined Posit as a principal architect. He was hired to advocate for the needs of the Python data ecosystem at Posit.[14]

In December 2023, Xie was laid off. In his time at Posit, Xie worked on R packages such as R Markdown, knitr, blogdown, and bookdown.[15][16]

Products

Screen show of the RStudio IDE, with four panes with code, plots, and other quick information while coding.
RStudio IDE screenshot
Hexagon shaped logo with the word tidyverse in the middle
tidyverse hex logo

Posit has a range of free and open-source products, along with its personal and enterprise solutions offering both free and paid plans.

Open source

  • tidyverse – suite of software packages for data analysis
  • Shiny – software to develop web applications
  • RStudio IDE – enhanced code editor for data analysis
  • Quarto – generate reproducible analyses and reports
  • ggplot2 – implementation of Grammar of Graphics for data visualization

Personal

  • Posit Cloud – run data analyses in your browser
  • Shinyapps.io – host Shiny web applications
  • Public Package Manager (PPM) – package management, optimized for data science to help with reproducibility and collaboration
  • Positron IDE – a code editor for data science[17]

Enterprise

  • Posit Workbench – centralized serve to collaborate on R and Python projects with
  • Posit Connect – share data science content, like Shiny applications, across the organization
  • Posit Package Manager – control, organize, and govern the use of software packages
  • Posit Team – bundles Workbench, Connect, and Package Manager together
  • Posit Academy – mentor-led apprenticeships for learning data science skills

Conferences

Posit hosts conferences for the R developer community. They include a general conference (posit::conf, formerly rstudio::conf) and a Shiny developer conference.

General conference

List of RStudio conferences
Date Location Name Link Talks References/notes
January 13 - January 14, 2017 Orlando, FL rstudio::conf 2017 Website First RStudio conference
January 31 - February 3, 2018 San Diego, CA rstudio::conf 2018 Website
January 15 - January 18, 2019 Austin, TX rstudio::conf 2019 Website
January 27 - January 30, 2020 San Francisco, CA rstudio::conf 2020 Website
January 21, 2021 Online rstudio::global(2021) Website
July 25 - July 28, 2022 Washington D.C. rstudio::conf(2022) Talks RStudio rebrands to Posit[13][18]
September 17 - September 20, 2023 Chicago, IL posit::conf(2023) Talks
August 12 - August 14, 2024 Seattle, WA posit::conf(2024)

References

  1. ^ "Posit Benefit Corporation Annual Report". Archived from the original on 2023-01-19. Retrieved 2023-01-19.
  2. ^ "About". Posit.co. Archived from the original on 2022-11-02. Retrieved 2015-12-15.
  3. ^ ""Statutes of "The R Foundation for Statistical Computing""" (PDF). The R Foundation. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-04-03. Retrieved 2019-08-12.
  4. ^ "RStudio is becoming Posit". Posit.co. 27 July 2022. Archived from the original on 2022-11-02. Retrieved 2022-07-28.
  5. ^ Views, R. (2016-10-12). "Interview with J.J. Allaire". rviews.rstudio.com. Retrieved 2024-05-17.
  6. ^ Machlis, Sharon (2022-07-27). "RStudio unveils Shiny for Python". InfoWorld. Retrieved 2024-05-17.
  7. ^ Kasprzak, Peter; Mitchell, Lachlan; Kravchuk, Olena; Timmins, Andy (2020). "Six Years of Shiny in Research - Collaborative Development of Web Tools in R" (PDF). The R Journal. 12 (2): 20–42. doi:10.32614/RJ-2021-004. S2CID 231709443. Retrieved 12 March 2022.
  8. ^ "Welcome Hadley, Winston, and Garrett! - Posit". Posit.co. 2012-08-20. Archived from the original on 2024-05-17. Retrieved 2024-05-17.
  9. ^ "Shiny 0.8.0 released; Yihui Xie joins RStudio - Posit". Posit.co. 2013-11-15. Archived from the original on 2024-05-17. Retrieved 2024-05-17.
  10. ^ Machlis, Sharon (2016-11-30). "What's up with RStudio's 2 high-profile hires?". Computer World. Archived from the original on 2019-04-01. Retrieved 19 February 2018.
  11. ^ Machlis, Sharon (2020-01-29). "RStudio restructures to focus on 'public benefit'". InfoWorld. Retrieved 2024-05-15.
  12. ^ Kamath, Bhuvana (2022-11-16). "Is Python Slowly Eating R? The Reason Why RStudio Became Posit". AIM. Retrieved 2024-05-17.
  13. ^ a b Machlis, Sharon (2022-07-27). "RStudio changes name to Posit, expands focus to include Python and VS Code". InfoWorld. Retrieved 2024-05-15.
  14. ^ Machlis, Sharon (2023-11-06). "Python Pandas creator Wes McKinney joins Posit". InfoWorld. Retrieved 2024-05-17.
  15. ^ "Bye, RStudio/Posit! - Yihui Xie | 谢益辉". yihui.org. Retrieved 2024-05-17.
  16. ^ Machlis, Sharon (2024-01-05). "Posit lays off R Markdown, knitr creator Yihui Xie". InfoWorld. Retrieved 2024-05-17.
  17. ^ "Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE". InfoWorld. Retrieved 2024-09-07.
  18. ^ source, RStudio | Open; RStudio, professional software for data science teams on (2022-02-14). "Save the date for rstudio::conf(2022)! | R-bloggers". Retrieved 2024-05-19.