GNU PSPP

GNU PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a free as in freedom replacement for the proprietary program SPSS, and appears very similar to it with a few exceptions.

The most important of these exceptions are, that there are no “time bombs”; your copy of PSPP will not “expire” or deliberately stop working in the future. Neither are there any artificial limits on the number of cases or variables which you can use. There are no additional packages to purchase in order to get “advanced” functions; all functionality that PSPP currently supports is in the core package.

PSPP is a stable and reliable application. It can perform descriptive statistics, T-tests, anova, linear and logistic regression, measures of association, cluster analysis, reliability and factor analysis, non-parametric tests and more. Its backend is designed to perform its analyses as fast as possible, regardless of the size of the input data. You can use PSPP with its graphical interface or the more traditional syntax commands.

A brief list of some of the PSPP's features follows below. We also made available a page with screenshots and sample output. PSPP has:

• Support for over 1 billion cases.
• Support for over 1 billion variables.
• Syntax and data files which are compatible with those of SPSS.
• A choice of terminal or graphical user interface.
• A choice of text, postscript, pdf, opendocument or html output formats.
• Inter-operability with Gnumeric, LibreOffice, OpenOffice.Org and other free software.
• Easy data import from spreadsheets, text files and database sources.
• The capability to open, analyse and edit two or more datasets concurrently. They can also be merged, joined or concatenated.
• A user interface supporting all common character sets and which has been translated to multiple languages.
• Fast statistical procedures, even on very large data sets.
• No license fees.
• No expiration period.
• No unethical “end user license agreements”.
• A fully indexed user manual.
• Freedom ensured; It is licensed under the GPLv3 or later.
• Portability; Runs on many different computers and many different operating systems (GNU or GNU/Linux are the prefered platforms, but we have had many reports that it runs well on other systems too).

PSPP is particularly aimed at statisticians, social scientists and students requiring fast convenient analysis of sampled data.

Downloading PSPP

As with most GNU software, PSPP can be found on the main GNU ftp server: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/pspp/ (via HTTP) and ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/pspp/ (via FTP). It can also be found on the GNU mirrors; please use a mirror if possible.

There are some additional ways you can download or otherwise obtain PSPP.

Documentation

Documentation for PSPP is available online, as is documentation for most GNU software. You may also find more information about PSPP by running info pspp or man pspp, or by looking at /usr/share/doc/pspp/, /usr/local/doc/pspp/, or similar directories on your system. A brief summary is available by running pspp --help.

A developer's manual is also available in various formats. Developers of software designed to interoperate with PSPP or SPSS will find this manual's appendices particularly valuable, because they specify the data file formats in great detail.

A tutorial independently published by Prof. Gary Fisk may also be helpful to those first starting out with PSPP.

Further information

For further information, please browse our list of frequently asked questions to see if your issue is mentioned there. If it is not, you might also want to peruse the archives of our mailing list, pspp-users; the issue may have been discussed there. Failing that, you are welcome to subscribe to the list, and send a question of your own.

If you believe you have found a bug in PSPP, please report it either by sending a message to the mailing list bug-gnu-pspp or by using the bug tracker. To privately report a security vulnerability in GNU PSPP, please send your report to the pspp-security mailing list.

Announcements about PSPP are made on pspp-announce as well as (in common with most other GNU software) info-gnu.

Getting involved

Development of PSPP and GNU in general, is a volunteer effort, and you can contribute. For information, please read How to help GNU. If you'd like to get involved, it's a good idea to join the discussion mailing list (see above).

Test releases

Trying the latest test release (when available) is always appreciated. Test releases of PSPP can be found at http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/pspp/ (via HTTP) and ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/pspp/ (via FTP).

Reliability and accuracy of PSPP is something we take seriously. Accordingly, in addition to regular manual testing, snapshot builds including automatic regression tests are typically run every day.

Development

For development sources, issue trackers, and other information, please see the PSPP project page at savannah.gnu.org.

Translating PSPP

To translate PSPP's messages into other languages, please see the Translation Project page for PSPP. If you have a new translation of the message strings, or updates to the existing strings, please have the changes made in this repository. Only translations from this site will be incorporated into PSPP. For more information, see the Translation Project.

Maintainer

PSPP is currently being maintained by Ben Pfaff and John Darrington. Please use the mailing lists for contact.

Licensing

PSPP is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.