Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

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That sounds great! Why can't both proprietary software and open source software co-exist? For startups and small companies, open source software is great. For large enterprises, the cost of the software is a vanishingly small % of the cost, and in fact they don't care as much - a lot of large enterprises are continuing to open source their own internal tools.

MATLAB has over 2 dozen toolboxes, with insanely detailed documentation. We are actually very happy to have MATLAB and our engineers are trained to use it for decades. We gladly pay for it. It would be a massive undertaking to go GNU Octave even if it did everything MATLAB did. I think we are getting stuck in the weeds, the point is:

We are engineers. Software is a tool to get the job done.

There are many other packages that cannot compete with anything open source - ANSYS Mechanical for example.

>Why can't both proprietary software and open source software co-exist?

Probably because it's impossible to have code that is both proprietary and open source at the same time. Unfortunately the code is either public or it isn't, because of copyright law there's not really an in-between.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying your company should use any particular product, but you do have options of where you can put that money that you can exercise when it's most appropriate. None of those consultants seem to be as big as Mathworks though, which probably matters.

>There are many other packages that cannot compete with anything open source - ANSYS Mechanical for example.

It only takes one entrepreneur to get the ball rolling by releasing a serious open source competitor. The whole industry can build on top of it after that.

Would it really be “a massive undertaking to go GNU Octave” when its syntax is a superset of MATLAB’s?

Either way, in the longer term I think saving a bit of money wouldn’t hurt, spending some sponsoring Free software could eventually catch it up to competitors, and having Free industry standard tools more easily accessible to future engineers to begin decades of training earlier could benefit enterprises.

> Would it really be “a massive undertaking to go GNU Octave” when its syntax is a superset of MATLAB’s?

Does anyone actually use MATLAB just for the "MATLAB" part of it? Where I work, it's the Simulink part that's locked us in... I'm still not sure how MATRIXx withered away and gave Mathworks free reign in the control systems design space...

I don’t mind paying for software I guess.

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