If someone were to write a new open source
executable that ran Stata programs, then there would
be an interesting situation! I know this
was done once in the case of S-Plus and R,
but my own guess is that this is unlikely
to be repeated.
R is a wonderful thing, no doubt about
it, but the differences are every bit as
important as the similarities.
Just for the record, the econometrics package Ox, which is free to
academics in its 'console mode' (like Stata on a Unix telnet session),
although not Open Source, is capable of running a good deal of code
written in the GAUSS matrix language, and does so without any
infringement of intellectual property rights via reverse engineering.
Interestingly enough, the relative merits of the respective developers
show up as Ox running GAUSS in emulation mode faster than GAUSS running
in native mode on the same hardware in many instances.
