sense that material written on Wikipedia is free: others can edit, use, and redistribute at will. OpenStat was developed as a teaching aid. Other packages were developed for specific purposes but can be more generally used. One example is Epi Info, developed for public health. Several of the packages, PSPP, R and Osiris don't appear to give any statements about why they were developed, other than just general use for statistical analysis. These free software packages have been used in a number of scholarly publications. For example, OpenStat was used in a research letter to JAMA and in several published studies. Irristat is used in an agricultural report, EasyReg is listed or used in several papers, EpiInfo was also used in several papers, R was used in a number of papers and WinIdams was used in other papers. While Microsiris doesn't appear to be used in academic research, the author of the program was one of the original authors of OSIRIS, which was the starting program from which WinIdams was developed. The author of Microsiris also has contributed or co-contributed several components to WinIdams. Reviews of free statistical software There are a few reviews of free statistical software. There were two reviews in journals (but not peer reviewed), one by Zhu and Kuljaca and another article by Grant that included mainly a brief review of R. Zhu and Kuljaca outlined some useful characteristics of software, such as ease of use, having a number of statistical procedures and ability to develop new procedures. They reviewed several programs and identified which ones, at that time, had the most functionality. At that time, several of the programs may not have had all of the desired ability for advanced statistics. Grant reviewed some of the programing features of R, and briefly mentioned the availability of other programs. One other paper reviewed statistical packages, mainly commercial, but includes R. One article reviewed EasyReg and included a discussion of its accuracy. Only two reviews have compared the output of various packages. In the 2006 review, all of the packages read either CSV files or Microsoft Excel format. All of the packages gave exactly the same results for correlation and regression. The free software packages also gave the same regression results as did excel. One of the main differences among the packages was how they handled missing data. With the example data sets used in the review,