I was surprised by the news about the arising of a new organization for promoting R: the R Consortium. It’s interesting that this new organization says it will do the same thing as the existing R Foundation.
In fact, I may know already why a new R Consortium. Jean Tirole is a French professor of economics awarded with a Nobel Memorial Prize in economics and who has studied the economics of open source. He believes that commercial companies would have very little incentives to subsidize projects of open source appeal, unless the major beneficiaries of such enterprises could coordinate to put up a consortium, so they can minimize the risk of having too many free-riders.