[R] The hidden costs of GPL software?

[Federico Calboli]

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
Università 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