| Type: | Private |
| Former Name: | RStudio Inc, RStudio PBC |
| Industry: | Software publishing and SaaS platforms |
| Location: | Boston, Massachusetts, US |
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]
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] 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 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]
Posit has a range of free and open-source products, along with its personal and enterprise solutions offering both free and paid plans.
Posit hosts conferences for the R developer community. They include a general conference (posit::conf, formerly rstudio::conf) and a Shiny developer conference.
| 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[17] | ||
| September 17 - September 20, 2023 | Chicago, IL | posit::conf(2023) | Talks | |||
| August 12 - August 14, 2024 | Seattle, WA | posit::conf(2024) |