Re: [Gretl-devel] we need defense and/or marketing

On Tue, 10 Nov 2015, oleg_komashko(a)ukr.net wrote: > Dear all, A citation The following is a list of free open-source > software. We do not teach the use of these programs in our courses. > We teach using software that you may encounter is the workplace. > Support for these packages is limited > > the list of software: FreeMat gretl etc. > sourse: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/ems/for_students/it/free Not a big deal IMO. The attitude "you get what you pay for" has a long tradition. I delivered a seminar at a big research institution a couple of months ago (gretl-unrelated) and at lunch guy told me about his mistrust about free software because "if you pay for a piece of software, you have an implicit guarantee that it works properly"; to which I replied that he probably uses a web browser he never paid for, while OTOH I never heard of anybody sueing successfully StataCorp or QMS for bugs in Stata or Eviews (or MS for bugs in Excel, for that matter). The guy had a puzzled look, probably he had never considered things from that angle. In my experience, people tend to think subconciously that a piece of software is "pro-quality" if it has a large corporation/organisation behind. There's very little that can be done to change that, apart from letting time do its work and become a "household name" in the profession. My feeling is that we made a lot of progress in that direction over the past 5-10 years. I would guess that nowadays there is only a minority left who wouldn't trust the numerical results gretl yields (definitely not the case 10 years ago, when few people were even aware of the existence of the projects). My feeling is that there are two main obstacles remaining to wider adoption of gretl in teaching, research and among corporate users. First, software lock-in: if you've been using package X for a while, switching can be very costly. Second, network effects: if everybody around you uses package Y, it's hard for you to work successfully in a team, and you don't want to be seen as the stubborn advocate who makes everybody's life niserable because he insists that everybody else is wrong. Plus, there's peer pressure. I had a colleague once that used gretl exclusively for his paper, but decided, before the final submission, to re-do all the work in Stata "just in case the referees ask". Of course, that's silly, but given the do-or-die attitude that prevails in academia today, I don't blame him. Again, advocacy is ok, but only works up to a point. Time is on our side. ------------------------------------------------------- Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti