The reaction of your professors is entirely appropriate. A healthy skepticism is essential in any academic endeavour. At least that's what I learned in my PhD candidature. I trust however that such skepticism will be applied equally to all statistical anaylisis software - not just to PSPP.
One advantage that PSPP has over its proprietary counterparts, such as spss, is
that its implementation is open to scrutiny, comment and critical review.
This means that any problems with its algorithms are likely to be caught,
published and corrected. Whereas in the case of proprietary software one has
no idea of how accurate it is or is not.
If anybody has any information to suggest that PSPP is "not legal" they
should notify the FSF lawyers with these concerns.
J'
On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 06:11:21PM +0000, Nicholas Smith wrote:
Hey,
My name is Nicholas Smith and I am a PhD candidate at Auburn University in
Public Policy. I recently found your software and after reviewing it, was
extremely impressed. I started evangelizing on campus to my peers about your
software but I was met with considerable skepticism, especially by my
professors, that the software might not be legal or may not be statistically
accurate.
Well, as an open source advocate, I could not stand by and let this
happen. Tonight, I will be running a data set in both SPSS and PSPP. I will
post screenshots of both, along with all the tables and graphs. If they turn
out to be the same, the professors will no longer be skeptical and I can
continue to advocate for PSPP. I figured this might be helpful to you guys as
well, so I will email you my findings.
Nicholas Smith
PhD Candidate
Auburn University
334-524-1911
smit...@auburn.edu
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