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Mathematica 6 Launched
Ed Pegg writes "Wolfram Research has just released Mathematica 6. That link, in addition to the usual 'dramatic breakthrough' material, has an amazing flash banner that simultaneously shows a thousand mathematical demonstrations all at once. The animations came from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, a free service with 1200+ dynamically interactive examples of math, science, and physics, all with code. For the product itself, much is new or improved, with built-in math databases, improved visualizations, and more."
"I don't know what this does but the pictures are cool"
Engineering is the art of compromise.
What part of your problem would've been fixed if it had been open source, all other things being equal? Was your problem the licensing, the inferior Linux performance, or the fact that it would only reprocess workbooks? How would it being open source have fixed any of that? Even if it being OSS just meant that there was no licensing scheme that is only 1/3 of your listed problems (at best). Given that you were in such a hurry and that the code to do what Mathematica does is probably extremely complex I doubt you would've edited the code to fix problems #2 or #3. So, how exactly would OSS have helped you?
Is $1000 actually expensive? I can imagine that reproducing Mathematica in a months time would be a bit of a trick, so for an individual, maybe it isn't that expensive. If someone who makes a decent US salary used a license for a couple of years, it would only have to save them a couple of weeks to be worth it(so it could increase their productivity by ~1% and be a net win).
And I understand that if it were Open or Free that it could be the product of many free months of effort and be a win for its users, but the notion that hundreds of dollars for software is always unreasonable(it may not ever be preferable...) is a bit tiresome.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
It's this mindset...this "OSS is holy....just because" group-think that keeps OSS from truly gaining traction with mainstream users. It's the community's insular nature, lack of interest in how software is actually used by people, and general "We know better, so there" attitude that keeps the whole concept sidelined.
Marking my question as a troll might make the moderators feel like they've done something useful. All they've really done, though, is show their ignorance and their desire to not have to look at the real issues. They'd rather just hold on to their belief of "it's just better....because!"
I used Mathematica during my PhD thesis. It's a great piece of software that did save me a lot of time. Unfortunately, ever since I left that lab, I have no access to a Mathematica licences and I am not willing to spend the money on them just to re-visit some of the work I did back then. In a sense, part of my PhD work has a randsom equivalent to the purchase of a Mathematica licence.
All I can say is that I learned my lesson. Since I finished my PhD work I have moved exclusively to linux and tried to limit commercial lockin as much as possible.
Not to disparage either Ed or Mathematica (both of which are amazing in their own way), but shouldn't this post have been flagged in some fashion with a note that Ed is an employee of Wolfram Research and that this is thusly at least a semi-commercial post?
Many times a closed source app (especially one that is much more popular on Windows) will have poor support on Linux because not enough testing is done. Nor do they care to do more testing. There's not enough money in it for them. His case was a classic example. A basic function, one that everyone uses in Mathematica all the time, was not working in Linux.
So yes, speaking from experience I can say that, in general, an OSS program does have better support on Linux than a closed source app does. If Mathematica were open source, he wouldn't have had that problem in the first place. Sure if he were the first person to come across a bug, he would not have been able to quickly fix it, but that's not the point. The point is the bug would have been found and fixed a long time ago before he even came across it.
And it's not my fault that you didn't comprehend his problem with the liscensing. It seemed pretty clear to me.