I just compiled PSPP/PSPPIRE 0.6.0 and I have to say that I am very very
impressed with what I see so far. Tools like this are so important for
helping companies such as the one I work for transition to open-source
technologies. Many of our statisticians are comfortable using SPSS, and
transitioning them to a tool like R-CRAN would be more difficult than
transitioning them to a tool like PSPP.
I have a couple of questions for people who are knowledgeable about the
development of this software. Since I do both IT and data analysis for
the company, I am pretty well positioned to promote the use of OSS. I am
currently writing a report to the owners that evaluates OSS software
that exists today, and whether or not I think it could be useful to the
company. I am looking for some more information about PSPP and the goals
of the program.
1) The company I work for is (mostly) using SPSS version 11. Is there a
roadmap that outlines the feature parity goals for upcoming versions of
PSPP? I have found the list of features/commands that are not yet
implemented, but I'm looking for information to help me know "when" PSPP
might be able to meet all of our needs as a company.
2) The authors of SPSS have identified programmability as an important
feature for SPSS. I noticed that they are now shipping versions of SPSS
with python as a scripting language (!!!) and the ability to interface
with R. As I understand it, R-CRAN is not going to become part of SPSS,
but if you have both R installed, that SPSS will be able to use R's
remote functionality and use R-CRAN modules in SPSS routines. I'm
curious to know if PSPP is planning on doing this as well.
Thanks in advance for your help. I hope I will be able to write back in
a couple of months and announce that we are now using PSPP at the
company rather than SPSS.
--andy
--
Andrew Choens, MSW
Research Policy Analyst
Hornby Zeller Associates, Inc.
(518) 273 - 1614
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