"This frequent comment puzzles me. How did SAS drop the ball with universities? I thought they gave the software away free to universities..."
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"... For universities I imagine forming coursework around tools that are freely available and easy to download is a huge plus. Then when students graduate they already have experience with R, Python, Spark, etc. ..."
Those free libraries support scrounging. Scrounging is a free communal activity with it's own rewards system. Scrappy students make a game of scrounging for free resources, such as books, room, board, software, and food. The goal is to get what you can for the least amount of expenditure.
SAS is the opposite of that. Closed, elitist and exclusive. Exclusive elitists are the past. Scroungers are the future. In my opinion, this is another reason why SAS fell out of favor at Universities.
The history lesson below is very useful. Thanks for that!
I find it unfortunate that in parallel to all of this, open source caught up to SAS as well. For universities I imagine forming coursework around tools that are freely available and easy to download is a huge plus. Then when students graduate they already have experience with R, Python, Spark, etc.
Somehow companies like Adobe still make it work with products like Photoshop. I do think this was a huge blow to the SAS ecosystem over time.
Yet again SAS tried to ram Viya down people's throats and they gagged.
Who is "Mr. Metadata"?
Thanks for breaking it down! I didn't realize that their education move was because of that legal dispute.
In the early 2000s, there was a stripped-down version of SAS available for purchase known as SAS Learning Edition. World Programming Limited, a company in England, acquired SAS Learning Edition and used it to create WPS, a clone of SAS.
This led to a legal dispute between SAS Institute Inc. and World Programming Limited, known as SAS Institute Inc. vs World Programming Limited (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute_Inc_v_World_Programming_Ltd).
The European court ruled in favor of SAS on the grounds that WPS infringed on SAS Manuals and Documentation but rejected claims that the SAS language was copyrighted or that WPL violated the Learning Edition license agreement. SAS appealed in Europe then brought a separate lawsuit in the US - I don't recall how it all ended up or whether it is still ongoing.
It's worth noting that WPS was subsequently acquired by Altair, and they continue to offer a SAS clone called Altair Analytics WorkBench (https://altair.com/sas-language-capabilities).
As someone noted earlier, JHG is grumpy and intolerant of nonsense. Consequently, he withdrew SAS Learning Edition and made a firm commitment to strengthen protections against reverse engineering.
For a few years, universities lacked the same level of access to SAS for teaching, which they previously enjoyed with the SAS Learning Edition. As a result, they expressed their dissatisfaction loudly and frequently.
At some point it was decided to create a web version of SAS that students could access. The subsequent project resulted in something called the SAS Web Editor which became the basis for SAS OnDemand for Academics. The goal of the project was to provide something like Display Manager within a web interface. The SAS Web Editor was very popular and this eventually turned into SAS Studio. At some point Mr. Metadata came up with the idea of using VMs to deliver SAS Studio with no ability to look under the hood like you could do with SAS Learning Edition. This became University Edition and it became quite popular as well.
In recent years SAS has dropped University Edition and converted SAS OnDemand for Academics to be Viya based instead of SAS 9.4. This didn't go over so well because there was many books and course materials based on SAS University Edition which were made obsolete by University Edition no longer being available.
I've recall hearing this about 10 or 15 years ago, so the details are foggy. I just recall being shocked hearing it.