SAS Language Clone Now Free for Commercial Use

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.

4 thoughts on “SAS Language Clone Now Free for Commercial Use”

  1. Unlike the R scripting language whose developers, it seems without any doubt, kept in mind the idea of grammatical consistency, the SAS scripting language is so ridiculously inconsistent I wonder whether it might have been developed by several researchers who perhaps never talked to each other and never got acquainted with other SAS commands than those they developed for themselves!

    Also, the obsession of some companies with intellectual property is obnoxiously unhealthy.

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