SAS Institute
More info
- Creator
- Anthony Barr, James Goodnight, John Sall, Jane Helwig
- Released
- 1976
- Type
- Software company
- Website
- sas.com
The North Carolina analytics giant that never went public — and lost one of software's most consequential copyright cases.
SAS started as an agricultural statistics project at North Carolina State University around 1970. In 1976 four of its developers spun it out as a company in Cary, where it still sits, and James Goodnight has run it ever since. SAS became the standard in pharmaceutical trials, banking and government — industries where nobody gets fired for buying the expensive, proven option. Co-founder John Sall built the more interactive JMP.
In 2010 SAS sued Britain's World Programming, which had written its own interpreter for the SAS language. The EU Court of Justice ruled in 2012 that a program's functionality and programming language are not protected by copyright, only the code itself — a decision that gave clones and compatible implementations solid legal footing.