Juhapekka,
Thanks for the Open advocacy and references.
A good Mac alternative to Visual Basic is Real Basic:
<http://www.realbasic.com/>
It can actually imports Visual Basic files and compiles Windows software.
The academic pricing for the standard edition is $59.
There might be similar solutions for other platforms.
Yes, Open Source is a very powerful trend in computing and it works
wonderfully with "essential software". However, as many people are saying
here, QDA's user-base is probably too small (yet) to justify this kind of
initiative with complete packages. There are other options which might be
more realistic, market-wise.
One of these is "research software". Some very good research programs are
distributed for free because they are supported through grants. One of
those is Csound, a flexible and powerful environment for sound processing
initially developed at the MIT Media Lab:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/csound/frontpage.html
http://media.dr.rhbnc.ac.uk/csound/
http://www.musique.umontreal.ca/CEC/
It is distributed on most platforms in both binary compilations and
complete source and it is constantly enhanced by the help of its users. It
doesn't have a very large user base and probably doesn't contribute
significantly to its creators survival but it is beneficial for the
academic community. In this case, marketting issues don't matter. We would
be really lucky to have a similar thing in QDA but we shouldn't hold our
breath.
On the other hand, it may well be possible to imagine the advantages of QDA
support in other types of software. Is QDA supposed to be defined by the
use of "qualtitative software packages"? After all, some people probably do
"computer-based qualitative analysis" with word processors, commercial
database packages, spreadsheets, SGML tools and maybe even statistical
packages. If these products (some of which are available as open source
initiatives) could allow for basic QDA support and file could be converted
easily back and forth without loosing the "QDA level", the dream would come
true with the added value of being able to integrate different forms of
analysis in a single tool.
Well, these are just thoughts from a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology who
would like computer-based QDA to become as pervasive as statistics (if not
more!)...
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