To be fair, R began as an open source clone of S, a language developed at Bell Labs by Rick Becker and Allan Wilks in the 1970s. The utility of an important community resource written in S, statlib, was threatened by commercialization of S as a proprietary tool, Splus. R is not S is a play on S

Gentleman and Ihaka's role in R/S is analogous to Torvald's role in Linux/Unix