Open Source Scientific Apps?

Paranoid Diatribe asks: "I'm a Unix admin for a scientific computing environment at a large public university. In the past few weeks, I've had the (dis)pleasure of dealing with several vendors to get their applications re-licensed to run on various machines. These are vendors of scientific applications like MOLGEN, apps from MSI, and S-PLUS. There are many others. The majority use the most evil of license managers, Flex-LM. I spend more time messing with Flex, license key files, and calling the damned vendors than I do actually administering the boxes they run on. As such, I am becoming very disenchanted with these commercial vendors. Is there a compilation of alternative scientific computing apps (GPL, BSD, or other open license would be preferable) and how they match up to their commercial counterparts? I'm aware of Freshmeat.net and a small list at the OpenGL site (though many of these are commercial as well), but I was wondering if there was a better list of such apps."

Comments

Some hints

[mvw]

First you should talk with your customers, the scientists that use your software.

Usually there are folks around who know the open software in that area pretty good. Sometimes there are even people around who might be able to write it themselves, if they had the time/funding to do it.

Aside from that, I found some gems in the FreeBSD ports collection:

Look here

Browse the math, biology etc categories.

Of course you won't find applications for all problems, some stuff (I used to work for LabControl and their partner Chemical Concepts) is not only complicated and needs experience, but often is pretty boring, which nobody would do for free.

Scientific computing link

[AMK]

Another useful link: the Scientific Computing topic guide at python.org.

I work on a semiconductor-related project, and it's amazing how poorly written the fabulously expensive layout tools are. Take L-Edit as an example; the interfaces are ugly and poorly designed, the software quality is doubtful (it dumps core when you try to run it on a 16-bit X display). A free version, written to modern standards, would have a serious chance at winning out over the commercial stuff, or at least provide them with some competition.

SAL (Scientific Applications on Linux)

[Bingo Foo]

http://sal.kachinatech.com/index.shtml

Works for me.