Re: Are there any free, fully-compliant XSLT/XPath 3.0

I guess I'd qualify as a "once or twice a year" user of XSLT/XPath,
but I do follow this list while trying to filter out the "interesting"
posts, just to keep an ear on the "Xground".

As it stands, I don't think X* 3.0 will be overly attractive, although
usage of XML technologies will keep increasing in my organisation. Not
being able to play with any of the innovative features is certainly
one of the reasons.

Not addressing any SW provider in particular: -
There are models where SW isn't OS, but you (or someone) can
still investigate it. Getting a limited (by time or functionality or
quantity)
version is one way. (Any company with a reasonable ethics standard
will not abuse such an opportunity.) Some give free (or almost free)
licenses to
educational units, where students get it to know and might carry the
torch into the business world. I don't know how valuable the feedback
(bugs, feature requests,...) from non-paying users is, but this could
be an additional benefit.

-W

On 28/01/2013, Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> I'm attempting to get some numbers Liam?
>>
>>
>> I don't know of any survey that includes those who didn't vote?
>>
>
> Any half-respectable piece of market research will try very hard to
> avoid the bias you get when you use a self-selected sample of voters.
>
> Frankly, the data you will get by putting a questionnaire on the web and
> announcing it to people who follow XML-related mailing lists is worse
> than useless. Reaching the kind of people who wrote a couple of
> stylesheets a year or two ago, run them once a month and upgrade them
> once a year is virtually impossible, and those people are probably the
> large majority of our users.
>
> Saxon for 12 years or so has been getting 300 (1) downloads a day, and
> we have never had the faintest idea who is doing the downloading or what
> they use the software for once they get it (if anything). Nor do we know
> how many people acquire it by routes other than a SourceForge download
> (e.g., packaged with other software). We can all speculate, but we will
> never get more than 1% of these users to tell us, and the data from
> those 1% tells us nothing about the other 99%.
>
> Michael Kay
> Saxonica