The Extended Family

Since I’ve joined SAS, something has been bothering me: where is the community orientation to SAS macros and other programs? Don’t get me wrong, I know there is a large and loyal following of great SAS users out there. I’m talking about where those users hang out online, how they interact, and how they share code.

At home, I use an open source product called Joomla for my family’s website. Joomla is a great content management system, and one of a growing number of open source applications seeing widespread adoption among web developers. One of the reasons I selected Joomla was because the extensions freely available for the product were extensive: over 3,700 at last count. As people develop something to meet a need that they have, they will often post it to the Joomla community for others to use as well. Over time, some of these extensions have seen an installed base large enough to justify its own business. Other notable examples of this type of community include SourceForge and some aspects of MSDN.

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