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' -- Avoid eavesdropping. Send strong encryted email. PGP Public key ID: 1024D/2DE827B3 fingerprint = 8797 A26D 0854 2EAB 0285 A290 8A67 719C 2DE8 27B3 See http://sks-keyservers.net or any PGP keyserver for public key.
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