Posit PBC Report: Open Source for a Better World

Posit aims to create free and open-source software for data science, scientific research, and technical communication in a sustainable way, because it benefits everyone when the essential tools to produce and consume knowledge are available to all, regardless of economic means.
We believe corporations should fulfill a purposeful benefit to the public and be run for the benefit of all stakeholders including employees, customers, and the larger community.
As a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) and a Certified B Corporation®, Posit’s open-source mission and commitment to a beneficial public purpose are codified in our charter, requiring our corporate decisions to balance the interests of the community, customers, employees, and shareholders.
B CorpsTM meet the highest verified standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. Posit measures its public benefit by utilizing the non-profit B Lab®’s “Impact Assessment”, a rigorous assessment of a company’s impact on its workers, customers, community, and environment.
In 2019, Posit (then RStudio) met the B Corporation certification requirements set by the B Lab. In 2023, our certification was renewed, and we are proud to share that our B Lab Impact Assessment score rose from 86.1 to 92.5 with this renewal. The B Lab certification process uses credible, comprehensive, transparent, and independent standards to measure social and environmental performance. Details of these assessments can be found on our B Lab company page.
To fulfill its beneficial purposes, Posit intends to remain an independent company over the long term. With the support of our customers, employees, and the community, we remain excited to contribute useful solutions to the important problems of knowledge they face.
J.J. AllaireFounder & Executive Chair, Posit PBC
Tareef KawafPresident & CEO, Posit PBC
Posit’s mission is to create free and open-source software for data science, scientific research, and technical communication. We do this to enhance the production and consumption of knowledge by everyone, regardless of economic means, and to facilitate collaboration and reproducible research, both of which are critical to the integrity and efficacy of work in science, education, government, and industry.
In addition to our open source products, Posit produces a modular platform of commercial software products that enable teams to adopt R, Python, and other open-source data science software at scale. Posit also offers online services that make it easier to learn and use data science tools over the web.
Together, Posit’s open-source software and commercial software form a virtuous cycle. In most companies, a “customer” is someone who pays you. For us, a “customer” must include the open source community, with whom we exchange the currencies of attention, respect, and love. When we deliver value to our open source users, they will likely bring our software into their professional environments, which opens up the possibility of commercial partnerships. To keep this cycle flowing, our open source developers must know and care about the integrations with proprietary solutions that matter to our enterprise customers. It also means that Posit’s commercial teams consistently provide value to individuals who may never directly spend a dollar with us.
Posit’s approach is not typical. Traditionally, scientific and technical computing companies create exclusively proprietary software. While it can provide a robust foundation for investing in product development, proprietary software can also create excessive dependency that is not good for data science practitioners and the community. In contrast, Posit provides core productivity tools, packages, protocols, and file formats as open-source software so customers aren’t overly dependent on a single software vendor. Additionally, while our commercial products enhance the development and use of our open-source software, they are not fundamentally required for those without the need or the ability to pay for them.
As of December 2024, Posit is spending ~35% of its engineering resources on open-source software development, and is leading contributions to over 350 open-source projects. Posit-led projects targeted a broad range of areas including the RStudio IDE; infrastructure libraries for R and Python; numerous packages and tools to streamline data manipulation, exploration and visualization, modeling, and machine learning; and integration with external data sources. Posit also sponsors or contributes to many open-source and community projects led by others, including NumFOCUS, the R Consortium, the Python Software Foundation, DuckDB, Pandoc, pyodide, and ProseMirror, as well as dozens of smaller projects via the Open Source Collective or directly on Github. Additional information about our products and company contributions can be found in our “Year In Review” blog posts.
Today, millions of people download and use Posit open-source products in their daily lives. Additionally, more than 10,000 customers that purchase our professional products help us sustain and grow our mission. It is inspiring to help so many people participate in global economies that increasingly reward data literacy, and know that our tools help produce insights essential to navigating our complex world.
We want Posit to serve a meaningful public purpose, and we run the company for the benefit of our customers, employees, and the community at large. That’s why we’re organized as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).
What makes a PBC different from other types of corporations?
“A ‘public benefit corporation’ is a for-profit corporation organized under and subject to the requirements of this chapter that is intended to produce a public benefit or public benefits and to operate in a responsible and sustainable manner.” — Delaware Public Benefit Corporations Law
As a PBC and Certified B Corporation, we must meet the highest verified standar