{"id":3558,"date":"2011-06-06T22:30:38","date_gmt":"2011-06-06T21:30:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3558"},"modified":"2011-06-06T22:30:38","modified_gmt":"2011-06-06T21:30:38","slug":"academic-math-software-commercial-or-open-source","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3558","title":{"rendered":"Academic Math Software: Commercial or Open Source?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Should academic mathematical software (for both teaching and research) be open source, commercial or a mixture of both? \u00a0Personally I feel that a mixture is the best way to go which is why I am equally at home with either <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolfram.com\/mathematica\/\">Mathematica<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sagemath.org\/\">Sage<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mathworks.com\/products\/matlab\/\">MATLAB<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scilab.org\/\">Scilab<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gnu.org\/software\/gsl\/\">GSL<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nag.co.uk\/\">NAG<\/a> and so on. \u00a0Others, however, have more polarised views.<\/p>\n<p>Here are some I&#8217;ve come across from various places over the years (significantly shortened)<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We should teach MATLAB because MATLAB is the industry standard. \u00a0Nothing else will do!<\/li>\n<li>We should teach concepts, not how to use any particular program. \u00a0However, when things need to be implemented they should be implemented in an open source package.<\/li>\n<li>All research should be conducted using open source software. \u00a0Nothing else will do!<\/li>\n<li>Students are being asked to pay hefty fees to come to our University. \u00a0We should provide expensive mathematical software so that they feel that they are getting value for money.<\/li>\n<li>We should only provide open source software to staff and students. \u00a0This will save us a fortune which we can put into other facilities.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>and so on.<\/p>\n<p>Personally I feel that all of these views are far too blinkered. \u00a0When you consider the combined needs of all teachers, researchers and students in a large institution such as the one I work for, only a combination of both open source and commercial software can satisfy everyone.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d love to know what you think though so please have your say via the comments section. \u00a0If you could preface your comment with a brief clue as to your background then that would be even better (nothing too detailed, just something like &#8216;Chemistry lecturer&#8217;, &#8216;open source software developer&#8217; or &#8216;Math student&#8217; would be great)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Should academic mathematical software (for both teaching and research) be open source, commercial or a mixture of both? \u00a0Personally I feel that a mixture is the best way to go which is why I am equally at home with either Mathematica or Sage, MATLAB or Scilab, GSL or NAG and so on. \u00a0Others, however, have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-math-software"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-Vo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3558"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3562,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3558\/revisions\/3562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}