Browsing around I stumbled across an old post on Knowledge Integrity, Inc.’s site about weka and their work on an open source data mining tool.
It looks as if we might have quite a basket of products to compare when we move into the data mining arena.
I’ve yet to look into weka in detail, but I’m amazed by how blinkered I have been in accepting the default option: stick with a single software provider. If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got!
Actually, since SAS® has been our main software provider, what we’ve always had is great software and support.
What the credit crunch and economic downturn are forcing us to do is re-evaluate the price we pay and the return on investment, and this is the selling point of open source software.