I know this is a big business decision but I think it is fair to say that SAS is loosing ground and will be more in the near future. Since IBM SPSS is more open for users and SAS, on the other hand, is more more strick. Imagine SAS' University Edition is just a more complex and troublesome installation. You spent hours to fix it and MS does not like their VM Hyper-V to be turned off, so you just spend hours to use Oracle VBox or others such as VMware Fusion or Workstation. In addition, SAS' java integration is another complex problem to protect SAS' free usage! Finally, I know all over the world most academic people use IBM SPSS. So, I love to hear from SAS people and hope that they make a survey what the others think about this. I honestly like SAS and hope that they do something about this.
Please show me where you can get a FREE version of SPSS that is not a 15 or 30 day trial version?
I hope SAS would be what was in the past! More user friendly and more open!
Here's the thing with 'societies' that buy and use cracked software without a care, they don't value intellectual property.
And what exactly is code? It's intellectual property. This means that whatever you develop others will expect for free...I mean you never paid before so the concept of actually paying for software is alien...and if the software is free, the programmer should be cheaper as well. Seen it here left right and center, and cleaned up after it, at a much higher hourly rate 🙂
If the software that I take the time to develop and try to make a living on, someone 'cracks' and uses for free. That doesn't pay the bills and is not sustainable in the long run. It's a dead end path and the open source community is dealing with that backlash now and it will grow.
You clearly want to rant but you don't really have a question or a valid comment. If you're having trouble installing SAS UE I haven't seen any questions on the forum requesting help for set up, and I'm assuming you haven't contacted SAS support for help either, because they do help with the set up. SAS also has very generous set ups with Universities, at least in the US and Canada AFAIK, that allow for distribution across the campus at a very low cost. But like I said, you're ranting, you don't have a question and this is not productive.
Your initial premise is wrong, SPSS is not less restrictive in terms of licensing. Because you're using the license illegally and getting away with it doesn't make it right either.
Cheers.
SAS needs better licensing for individual level consultants.
SAS UE has no issues with Java and installation is relatively easy. If you have difficulty you can use the cloud versions via AWS or SAS Academics On Demand.
You cannot use the trial versions SPSS for commercial work so it has the same limitation as SPSS.
Academics with social sciences, primarily psychology use SPSS.
Statisticians, computer scientists, mathematicians use R, Python, or C.
SAS use in academia is less but that's a smaller market.
SAS is probably losing business ground, but SPSS is in the dust in that competition. I've never seen an Enterprise SPSS installation in my career.
Are you ready for the spotlight? We're accepting content ideas for SAS Innovate 2025 to be held May 6-9 in Orlando, FL. The call is open until September 16. Read more here about why you should contribute and what is in it for you!