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GNU Octave 3.0 Released After 11 Years

Posted by kdawson on from the math-just-works dept.

Digana writes "GNU Octave is a free numerical computing environment highly compatible with the MATLAB language. After 11 years of development since version 2.0, stable version 3.0 released yesterday. This version is interesting because unlike other free or semi-free MATLAB competitors like Scilab, specific compatibility with MATLAB code is a design goal. This has manifested itself in goodies like better support for MATLAB's Handle Graphics, a syntax closer to MATLAB's own for many functions, and many functions from the sister project Octave-Forge ported to the core Octave project for an enriched functionality closer to the toolboxes provided by MATLAB. GUI development is underway, but still no JIT compiling, which is a show-stopper for Octave newbies coming from MATLAB with unvectorized code."

6 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Re:11 Years? by nacturation · · Score: 5, Funny

    11 Years no GUI, and no JIT and only partial MATLAB support.

    Tell me again why GNU FreeSoftware is a better development model if you don't mind. It may not be the best now, but just wait until HURD is released... then this development model's superiority will be obvious!
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  2. Good and bad news by mangu · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The good news is that they are doing in a free way what the Matlab Co. has been charging (a lot!) for, which is distributing an API to use all those libraries the US Federal Government labs give away for free.


    The bad news is that they are wasting their time using the Matlab syntax, while there is a much better alternative for doing exactly the same thing. Python is universal, if there's anything you can do with a computer, the simplest way to do it is with Python, so why do it the hard way?

    1. Re:Good and bad news by samkass · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The good news is that they are doing in a free way what the Matlab Co. has been charging (a lot!) for

      But taking their time at it. Don't get me wrong-- I'm glad open source exists. But this project kind of supports the idea that open source can't really innovate, only follow (sometimes far) behind what proprietary companies invent. It would have been really interesting to see what some of the open source folks could do if their goal was to surpass MATLAB instead of be an almost-free version that's almost as good as something that people almost like to use.

      --
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    2. Re:Good and bad news by insignificant1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Wow. The leagues of uninformed.

      You think there are two things here, Matlab and Octave. Matlab is proprietary, and Octave followed it. It's as simple as that to you.

      But wait, where does much of the meat in Matlab come from? Netlib. OPEN SOURCE! HAHAHAHA (Some of the Netlib code has license restrictions, some does not.)

      http://www.netlib.org/

      What does Matlab use for optimized BLAS routines to run super-quick on your Windows/Linux/Mac? ATLAS. Check out the Sourceforge page:

      http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/

      The really important thing for me is that now that Octave is out there (actually, Octave has been around since about 1994), the explorations that I made in undergrad in Matlab can be done entirely in Octave now and forever. A good tool doesn't get worse as it gets old, it just gets used more.

      If there was once a patent on hammers, there is no less usefulness in (but much lower prices on) hammers after the patent expires. Now we get much of Matlab's functionality completely free. Congratulations John Eaton, et al., for giving all who follow another tool to use freely to build bigger and better tools.

      And as others have mentioned, if you don't like Matlab/Octave, use another tool that tried to accomplish the task of a high-level numerical tool in a different way. To me, however, I can code up an algorithm, test out concepts, and produce incredibly helpful visualizations in a matter of minutes using Matlab or Octave. Any tool this powerful has a learning curve to get over before it is so efficient, and I climbed that learning curve with Matlab, but I was able to use Octave immediately because I had already gone through that process using Matlab.

      If you made a completely innovative new tool, it likely wouldn't be worth it for me to use for a while because I am so fast at coding Matlab/Octave, and the whole point in these tools is to make the programmer's job easy (if I wanted fast code execution, C or Fortran could be used).

  3. Re:11 Years? by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Features? Maybe I can't beat you there. Reliability? Absolutely (GNU code is at least on par with BSD and other Unixes, and far more reliable than other systems, in my experience). GNU won't waste your time with a license check; when my school's Matlab license server went down, me and my peers were left out in the cold, with final projects looming over our heads.

    My school will not give students a copy of Matlab for any purpose, because of license restrictions. We can either use a school terminal (ever wonder what a crowded computer lab looks like?), or run it off a Solaris server (X11 forwarding, leaving Windows and most Apple users out of the loop) which has strict resource limits imposed (forget processing anything big). Of course, with this setup, it is completely impossible to hook up any specialized hardware to the system running Matlab, so to process data from the real world, we must first collect it on one computer, then copy it over to a computer with Matlab installed (which is rarely in the same room as the equipment in use), and no, you cannot process anything as it happens, and yes, our disk space on the Solaris server is limited to 100MB, so your data can't be too large (not that you get enough CPU cycles to process anything large).

    Octave? Right on my system. On any system I want, actually. I miss a few features, and bit of Matlab compatibility (not nearly as bad as it sounds, I have yet to have it be an actual problem), and a GUI (which I am not at all concerned about -- I'll take a functional CLI over a dysfunctional GUI any day), but in the end, I get what I needed: Something that allows me to work with other people's Matlab code, without having to wait in line for a computer or worrying about a resource limit on a Unix server. If Mathworks stopped screwing around with license restrictions, that are even worse than Wolfram (the maker of Mathematica, which is also mangled in license restrictions), I would never have even looked into Octave.

    --
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  4. Re:Well, if they ever become competitive to Matlab by steve_bedrick · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I bought a license for Matlab for my old PowerPC-based PowerBook about a year ago, and was initially quite pleased with Mathworks- the times I had to call them for support, they were helpful and responsive. All that changed when I switched to an Intel-based Mac a month or so ago. While moving all of my software over to my new laptop, I observed that most software companies used one of two possible approaches to the software redistribution problem:
    1. Release an Intel-compatible binary of their product, and make it available to current license-holders free of charge; or
    2. Take advantage of the opportunity to do a new major-version revision of their product, which license-holders would have to pay to upgrade to.

    Each of these, to me, seem like reasonable solutions— if it's a major-version update, I'd have to pay for it anyway... and if it's just a recompiled version of the product I already have, it should be free to current users. It turns out, however, that there was a third possibility, which is what Mathworks chose:

    3. Release a new minor-version Universal Binary update, and then make all current customers buy a new full-price license in order to get it.

    So, in order to run Matlab on an Intel-based Mac, current PowerPC license holders have to re-purchase their expensive software from scratch. No upgrade path, no nothing— just a nice, loud, "screw you" from Mathworks to their users. And it's not like we could just use our PowerPC verisons under Rosetta- there was a workaround, but it involved disabling all of the graphing/visualization features. Basically, it was a "pay for a full new license or don't use Matlab on your new computer" kind of thing.

    I dunno, maybe it's not that big of a deal, but it still felt pretty crappy. From a customer service standpoint, it wasn't exactly a master-stroke- it wouldn't have really cost them anything just to let current license-holders have an Intel-compatible copy of the software they'd already paid for...