FAQ

[John Darrington]

I'm proposing that we add the following item to the FAQ on the web
page.  Any comments?

<h2>Why don't you merge PSPP with <a
href="http://www.r-project.org";>R</a>, <a
href="http://gretl.sourceforge.net";>GRETL</a>, <a
href="http://www.octave.org";>Octave</a> ... 
&lt;my favourite program&gt;?</h2>
<p>This is unlikely to happen for several reasons:</p>

<ul>
<li>PSPP has different goals to these other programs. PSPP is intended
 to be a <a href="/philosophy/free-sw.html">Free</a> version of SPSS,
 and fully compatible with it, whereas
 GRETL (for example) provides its own language and structure.</li>  
<li>It's probably harder than you think.  Merging two programs which
have been developed independently is rarely trivial.</li>
<li>PSPP has several technical advantages over its counterparts
which we don't wish to loose.  Notably PSPP is very efficient at
processing extremely large datasets.</li>
<li>Many of these other programs have numerous authors, each holding
copyright on their respective parts.  By contrast, the copyright in
PSPP is help by one entitity (the Free Software Foundation), which
makes for easier copyright tracking and enforcement.  Merging with
another program would mean loosing this advantage, or needing to ask
scores of authors to re-assign their copyright. This would be neither
practical nor polite.</li>
</ul>

<p>However, we certainly want to provide features which will make PSPP
easier to interact with other programs.
If you want an import/export filter or some other feature to help PSPP
complement your favourite program, then please talk to us about
it.</p>


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