Posit PBC. Posit PBC (or Posit) is an open-source data science software company. It is a public-benefit corporation founded by J. J. Allaire, creator of the programming language ColdFusion. 

Posit has no formal connection to the R Foundation, a not-for-profit organization located in Vienna, Austria, 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.

History 

Before the company started, Allaire initially started RStudio, the integrated development environment (IDE), as an open source project. He recruited Joe Cheng to help work on this project, who would eventually become Posit's CTO. Moreover, Cheng would conceptualize and develop the Shiny web framework in 2012.

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.

In November 2013, Yihui Xie joined Posit to work on the Shiny package. He created the knitr, cranvas, and animation packages, among others.

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.

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.

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 users to convert to using their products. Posit's commercial products were renamed Posit Connect, Posit Workbench, and Posit Package Manager.

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.

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.

Products 

Posit has a range of free and open-source products, along with its personal and enterprise solutions offering both free and paid plans.

Open source 

 tidyverse – suite of software packages for data analysis
 Shiny – software to develop web applications
 RStudio IDE – enhanced code editor for data analysis
 Quarto – generate reproducible analyses and reports
 ggplot2 – implementation of Grammar of Graphics for data visualization

Personal 

 Posit Cloud – run data analyses in your browser
 Shinyapps.io – host Shiny web applications
 Public Package Manager (PPM) – package management, optimized for data science to help with reproducibility and collaboration
 Positron IDE – a code editor for data science

Enterprise 

 Posit Workbench – centralized serve to collaborate on R and Python projects with
 Posit Connect – share data science content, like Shiny applications, across the organization
 Posit Package Manager – control, organize, and govern the use of software packages
 Posit Team – bundles Workbench, Connect, and Package Manager together
 Posit Academy – mentor-led apprenticeships for learning data science skills

Conferences 

Posit hosts conferences for the R developer community. They include a general conference (posit::conf, formerly rstudio::conf) and a Shiny developer conference.

General conference

References

External links 
 Posit - B Corporation Listing

Benefit corporations
Companies based in Boston
R (programming language)