Possible Opertunity for Adoption of Open Source Software - Need Feedback

[Pat_Primate]

Hello Everybody, I am a new convert to GNU/Linux and Ubuntu, but I have been trying to use open-source software for quite some time before I switched from windows (wingimp, open office, etc. etc.). I am a Psychology major at my local university (TRU.ca) and talking to the head of the Psych department earlier this week I found out that our university no longer wants to use SPSS as our statistical program, so they are looking for a new Statistics program for Psychology students to use.

I know money is an issue for the university, so I suggested that they look into open source statistical programs, but my proffessor (head of psych department) wasn't familiar with the concept, and my brief outline of "its free software" got a reply of 'I don't think that will work, we need something with good documentation'. Unfortunately we were in the middle of class so the discussion ended there, but I think this is a possible oppertunity for adoption of open source software (at least for this one program, but if it is successful there could be further switches in the future).

So what I am needing feedback on is a list of possible candidate statistical programs for the psych department. They would need to run on windowsXP (the unfortunate Operating System of my University), they would need to be mature, fully functional statistical programs capable of performing all the the tasks a Psychologist would need (such as correlations, T-tests, ANOVAs, etc. etc.) and it would need to be able to provide high quality output in the form of graphs and charts and print outs. And it would have to have excellent documentation/manuals for begginers to easily learn on. If there are any open source programs out there that meet these standards please let me know and I will suggest them to the Psych head.

Thank you for your Help :)

Pat

[Mr_J_]

Sorry to be less than helpfull, but have you looked at http://sourceforge.org ?

[ssam]

have a look in the maths section of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuScientists

R (http://www.r-project.org/) might be what you need.

[mips]

http://sourceforge.net/search/?words=Psychology&type_of_search=soft

Or google Open Source/Freeware Psychology Software

http://ltsnpsy.york.ac.uk/LTSNASP/buildSQL.asp

[crispingatiesa]

Google for "WinIdams" it is a UNESCO maintained Free Statistical Packcage and is very complete. It has all the documentation and performs all the multivariate analysis that you will ever need.

You can complement it with "Scilab" if you need something more like Maple.


Luck

[mips]

http://freestatistics.altervista.org/comp.php
http://freestatistics.altervista.org/stat.php

[Pat_Primate]

Thank you all for your suggestions, I'll take a look at these programs and forward them to my Proffessor.

Hopefully I can convince the Psych department to support the Open Source community :)

I'll let you know if it works out.

Pat