Sage: Can There be a Viable Free Open Source Alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab? | Hacker News Reader

Sage: Can There be a Viable Free Open Source Alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab?

sagemath.blogspot.com

23 pointsdood15 comments

I'd like to see a suite made for a normal, popular interpreted language, like Python. I'd like to see it server side, built in a cloud, to have the computing power I need. Compiling is no longer a problem for me, but boy can a huge matrix routine take a long time. I'd also like subscription AI tools.

There is clearly an opportunity here for a 37Signals style company to provide a Python tool or in browser that connects to the cloud and other services. Someone please make it.

This looks like a huge deal, and I'm surprised this isn't already in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories. Especially since it's GPL (not clear from sagemath.org, took some digging to confirm) and most of the base packages are in Debian. I did find this: http://wiki.sagemath.org/DebianSAGE

Still, I'm shocked that this has gone under the radar for so long. Is this par for the course for academics -- creating something impressive and waiting years before publicizing it? Regardless, I will certainly make a point of evangelizing Sage when I go back to school this fall.

This is pretty sweet. My roommates and I couldn't have made it through school without the pirated copies of Matlab floating around.

Don't do this, really. The Mathworks has a great product and offers tremendous support, training, etc. Beyond that they have always been extremely reasonable in their licensing, e.g. letting me run the Mac version on my laptop at home and the Linux version when I'm at work. There is a student version which costs you less than a lot of textbooks. If you want free then try Sage, R, Octave, etc. Don't ripoff a good company.

I meant that I would have used Sage if I had known about it. I'm certainly not advocating piracy - Matlab is a fantastic product and well worth the money. That part had more to do with the school's horrific IT program than anything else.

Students getting accustomed to using mathworks is far more valuable than the cost of the student version fee. If he goes on to encourage his future employer to get the business licenses/support then this will absolutely dwarf what a whole school full of paying students would bring in.

Also note that in the majority of schools you have already payed to use mathworks (through tuition) if you are in any engineering program. I don't know why it would be so much more ethical to pay twice...

So, if you want to support mathworks/photoshop/etc then you should encourage broke students to get it on their home computers by any means possible. Many of these companies practice this strategy. Thus ends my pricing hypothesis.

Can you mention a company whose official strategy is to have their software pirated by one group of users under the theory that they will make it up with increased legitimate sales? Yes, companies love having students using their software which is why they give huge discounts on the fees.

Paying tuition does not mean that have "paid to use" Matlab unless your institution has actually bought licenses for you to do so. If you are saying, "We were using a floating license paid for by the university and therefore did not need to purchase an additional license." Okay, fine. If you are arguing that because the physics department bought two licenses for lab machines that you somehow have the right to pirate copies without a license then you are mistaken.

Bottom line: I support the good guys, the companies that respect me and help me to do the best work I can. The Mathworks is one of those companies, in my experience.

Bill Gates doesn't support piracy, but if it's going to be pirated it might as well be Microsoft software: "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though," Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

http://www.news.com/2100-1023-212942.html

baaawwwwwwwwww

Luckily our school had Matlab on the lab computers, it was very useful.

octave is pretty good

and the nice thing about Octave is that it's largely Matlab-compatible, so all your knowledge of programming Matlab doesn't go wasted.

A few years ago, I was doing research work with MatLab and there were tons of licensing issues at the university I was working with. I suggested we abandon MatLab and adopt Octave only to receive responses such as:

"It's open source software, which means it's largely unfinished and you can't guarantee that all the math routines are actually doing the right thing."

I eventually had to give in because my advisor was getting annoyed (and his grant was paying my rent), but the point is that it's unfortunate that _more_ really intelligent people don't contribute to Octave, verify it's correctness and talk it up. Please don't misconstrue my statement as saying "the people working on Octave aren't really intelligent," but having the support of _lots_ of really intelligent people is the only way that it's going to make any significant impact on the scientific research community.

"It's open source software, which means it's largely unfinished and you can't guarantee that all the math routines are actually doing the right thing."

Um... I think you have a better chance of guaranteeing a routine works when you can inspect what it's actually doing below the hood. Something like MATLAB is based completely on trust (albeit, deservedly).

Sage goes in every field?

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