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throwawaysalome

Had to reread five times before realizing "fellow researcher" was not "in your institute."

Commercially-licensed software is a true pain

I'm sorry the fruits of our labor don't come free. Some of us enjoy resort vacations.

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When tied to academic research this has bigger implications.

Reproducibility is difficult or impossible to assess when there's no source, and it also requires higher barriers to entry (= money). The output of that research will also be tied the commercial license: academics can often get better offers, but you as a user are going to be outpriced.

I'm biased for sure, but I'm a deep believer in open research. The output of what I do/did should be free for everyone.

R being fully open and free is a big part in what it made it so popular in research.

Agreed. Software that is free for academics might be $10,000/year for an industry user with a ton of red tape to boot. I hate it, but they have to get the money from somewhere unless it's fully open source. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't as well.

As it sits, they like to get users hooked in college and then they're less likely to ever switch.

First up, as the gp explains, the cost isn't the biggest hurdle.

Secondly, research institutes have little money. For example: you may think the world has been on HDMI since somewhere around 2010 or so. Think again. End of 2021, my research institute replaced their monitors, which meant i no longer was using VGA out on a daily basis.

(Computers typically are on a 3- or 4-year replacement cycle; monitors, projectors, keyboards, etc. aren't. )

Third, what if my university decided to buy Mathematica instead but this week I have to collaborate with this guy whose university Matlab?

If the code is only a few pages, I would expect it to be rather easy to translate for most cases.

Mathematica is a rare exception as it is generally used in a much more functional programming esque approach than the imperative/OO style common elsewhere. I find pushing data to black box Mathematica functions to be very simple (and they have stuff for practically everything), but some very simple stuff eludes me due to the language model.

So I guess your point stands (especially if it's a large code base).

Translation may involve translation errors.

There's value in running exactly the code which a researcher used in research to evaluate said research.

I understand you now and agree.

Missing the point by a country mile. No-one complains about AWS licencing because it's easy: create an account and pay for what you use. Most commercial software is a pain because you have to keep track of licenses.

Oh, and working with Open Source software means I get paid approximately double what an equivalent Microsoft specialist does. Learning Linux has been the biggest payoff of my career.

I didn't. One-for-one products like AWS instances lend themselves to less obtrusive enforcement. One-for-many products like desktop software require pain-in-the-ass key management.

You're an IT guy for a [insert commodity here] manufacturer. Nothing wrong with that. When the IT itself is what's being sold, you have to protect your product.

Heh, I am indeed an IT guy. I'm an SRE who spends his time fixing screwups by devs when I'm not teaching them about systems.

It's a big world out there kid.

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