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Open Source Math
An anonymous reader writes "The American Mathematical society has an opinion piece about open source software vs propietary software used in mathematics. From the article : "Increasingly, proprietary software and the algorithms used are an essential part of mathematical proofs. To quote J. Neubüser, 'with this situation two of the most basic rules of conduct in mathematics are violated: In mathematics information is passed on free of charge and everything is laid open for checking.'""
That data wants to be free including binaryies. It obivous to me and I am a expert all around this feilds
You can read Sylow's Theorem and its proof in Huppert's book in the library.
Someone had to purchase a copy of the book and place it in the library.
Someone [Andrew Carnegie?] had to pay to build the library in the first place, and someone else has to pay to perform maintenance on the library to make sure that the roof doesn't leak and the walls don't crack and the floor doesn't sag.
Someone has to pay to heat the library in the winter, and to cool the library in the summer.
Someone has to pay to hire the librarian, and her support staff, and her computer systems.
The book only seems "free" to these cancerous leeches because they aren't the ones whose tax dollars are being stolen to subsidize their little Shangri-La paradises.
[And that's assuming you can even find the book in the library at all - in my experience, if the book is halfway decent, then either it's been checked out by a professor for the next six months, or else it was stolen by a student years ago and will never be replaced. All of which you will discover AFTER you walk a mile to get to the library, because the administration - in their infinite wisdom - forgot to provide any parking spaces anywhere near the library.]
If they really want mathematics to be "free", then they can post the LaTeX's & the PDF's of these books on the internet for anyone to download, and they can pay for the server disk space & bandwidth THEMSELVES.
In the meantime, they can take their marxist hypocrisy and shove it right up their good-for-nothing, lazy, worthless asses.
If you are doing research, what would you rather use? Politically correct "open source" software that is buggy and broken or software that *just works*? The fact is, Apple has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that well paid professional American programmers can outdo anyone anywhere when it comes to software development. OS X leopard has been called the best operating system ever written, and a (much) better linux than linux. Why would you need anything else?