The hidden costs of GPL software?
Philippe Grosjean wrote:
I would be interested by your impressions and ideas on this topic.
I have found that "user friendly" packages make a lot of assumptions and take a lot of decisions for the user. This makes things easy, but you do not really know what is going on, and I'd say this is a hidden cost of "commercial" software. I wrote to the list in February asking how to reproduce some results previously obtained with Statistica. It turned out that Statistica does some data manipulation without telling the user, with poor documentation and no options or choice. Do you trust results obtained this way? I don't. So I'd argue that the lack of a GUI is a good thing, because it forces the users to think a bit more about what they want to do, and gives more control on what is going on. Best, Federico Calboli
Federico C. F. Calboli Dipartimento di Biologia Evoluzionistica Sperimentale Universit?? di Bologna Via Selmi, 3 40126 Bologna - ITALY Tel - +39 051 2094187 Fax - +39 051 2094286 f.calboli at ucl.ac.uk fcalboli at alma.unibo.it