> On 15 Nov 2015, at 5:09 pm, John Darrington <j...@darrington.wattle.id.au> > wrote: > > 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. >
Fair comment John Nigel > > 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. > _______________________________________________ Pspp-users mailing list Pspp-users@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-users
