Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 15:17:10 +1100
Reply-To: Tim CHURCHES <TCHUR@DOH.HEALTH.NSW.GOV.AU>
Sender: "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU>
From: Tim CHURCHES <TCHUR@DOH.HEALTH.NSW.GOV.AU>
Subject: Re: Yet more thoughts on SAS for Linux -Reply -Reply
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
John Whittington writes:
> As far as argument (a), partially a 'humanitarian' one, if cost were the
> problem, then that could simply be addressed by SI adopting a more
> 'humanitarian'/charitable approach to licence fees (for the current
> releases) in developing countries and/or for other situations (like me -
> see below!!) where money was a problem.
Absolutely! We are not all Fortune 500 companies! However, for many government departments and NGOs in developing countries, their marginal or discretionary budgets for "non-essential" activities such as using data to inform policy or action perhaps extends to the purchse of a cast-off 486 PC. Cheap SAS licenses would need to be very cheap to be affordable. But any reduction helps - as you point out, its all relative and there are plenty of pockets of relative economic deprivation even in verdant Buckinghamshire!
> If the problem is that they don't have hardware capable of running >current releases of SAS, then I agree that they
> might need earlier releases - but I didn't think that was primarily what > you were arguing. I would certainly see no real problem in offering > cheap/free an unsupported version of an ancient release, to people > who fully understood 'what they were missing', but simply didn't have > the hardware to run newer releases.
Yes, that is the almost universal problem in my experience in developing countries (except for the offices of large multinational corporations in those countries).
> By analogy, I don't suppose MS would get too excited about
> someone with only a DOS machine acquiring (in 1999) a pirated copy
> of Word 2.0 (or even 5.5) for which they received no licence fee.
Nearly ever computer I have ever seen in the Philippines ran pirated MS-DOS and either Word 2.0, WordPerfect 5.1 or WordStar...
> My greater concern (now I've thought about it) is with (b). Particularly
> those who have been exposed to 1999 applications could well be so
> 'put off' by SAS 6.04 that they would 'give up and look for something
> more sensible' before they became SAS literate and would perhaps be
> very unlikely to recommend SAS to their subsequent employers.
Yes, but apart from the substitution of graphical fonts and a few more dialogue boxes, what is fundamentally different about the interface presented to the first time user of SAS 6.12 compared to SAS 6.04? If they are scared off by 6.04 (understanding that it is 10 years old), methinks they will be scared off by 6.12 too. These people were intended by (insert superior being of your choice) to be SPSS users.
> To repeat my earlier analogy, do you think that exposure to a
> DOS-only 386 PC would necessarily convince a member of the public
> that they simply had to have a 1999 PC system in their kitchen?
No, but that won't stop lots of people upgrading to Pentium III processors to run their blenders.
I think that I had best stop trying to second guess the SI marketing department and boring everyone silly - anyway I suspect that we are all just, err, micturating in the presence of an adiabatic disturbance (as they say in polite circles) (although my spouse, being of the fair sex, didn't see what the problem might be with that).
Cheers,
Tim C
