Re: PSPP for Windows

[John Darrington]

On Sun, Nov 15, 2015 at 10:26:20AM +1000, Nigel Brown wrote:
     
     
     I think the exception of reliable behaviour on Windows comes from PSPP???s 
own webpage when it says ???It is a Free replacement for the proprietary 
program SPSS???. Many probably wouldn't expect a ???replacement" to require a 
different operating system to be a reliable replacement. Perhaps it should say 
???It is a Free replacement for the proprietary program IBM SPSS Statistics for 
Linux???.
     

There are serveral issues here:

1.  Freedom is more important than reliability.  The purpose of PSPP is too 
allow
people to escape their proprietary systems.  Before there was PSPP people used 
to
say - "I can't run a free OS because I need SPSS"  - now that excuse does not 
apply.

2.  "For Linux" is just wrong.  "Linux" is a kernel and PSPP has nothing to do 
with
it except that PSPP can run on operating systems which also happen to use 
Linux.  We
don't make any system calls to the kernel except through the standard library. 
See
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html for more information on this issue.
We could of course have said "for GNU" but I think people will realise it is 
for GNU
because the page is hosted on the www.gnu.org

3.  I see no reason to advertise IBMs product more than necessary.  So we don't 
want
to spell out the name in full.  People who already use SPSS probably know who 
sells
it.  If they don't - well we don't want to make it pertinent.

4.  We don't make any claims about reliability except that PSPP is more 
reliable 
under GNU under other systems.    I don't regularly use Windows these days,
but I have acquaintances that do and from what I gather no application is 
reliable
on that OS.  Crashes, hangs, wierd behaviour are just a fact of life on Windows.
This is consistent with my experience from many years ago too  that, and the 
freedom
issue was why I stopped using it.


J'
     

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