The hidden costs of GPL software?

All:

I have much enjoyed the discussion. Thanks to all who have contibuted.

Two quick comments:

1. The problem of designing a GUI to make R's functionality more accessible
is, I believe just one component of the larger issue of making
statistical/data analysis functionality available to those who need to use
it but do not have sufficient understanding and background to do so
properly. I certainly include myself in this category in many circumstances.
A willingness and commitment to learning ( = hard work!) is the only
rational solution here, and saying that one doesn't have the time really
doesn't cut it for me. Ditto for R language functionality?

2. However, R has many attractive features for data manipulation and
graphics that make it attractive for common tasks that are now done most
frequently with (ugh!) Excel (NOT Statistica, Systat, et. al.). For this
subset of R's functionality a GUI would be attractive. However, writing a
good GUI for graphing that even begins to take advantage of R's flexibility
and power in this arena is an enormous -- perhaps an impossible -- task.
Witness the S-Plus graphics GUI, which I think is truly awful (and appears
to thwart more than it helps, at least from many of the queries one sees on
that news list). So I'm not sanguine.

Again, thanks to all for a thoughful and enjoyable discussion.

-- Bert Gunter
Genentech Non-Clinical Statistics
South San Francisco, CA

"The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning
process."  - George E. P. Box

The hidden costs of GPL software?

Thread (37 messages)