William Stein wrote: >> I recall at one point our department had a license for the whole >> department (150 or so staff). 10 years later and my boss suggested I >> should consider using something else, like MATLAB, as I was the only >> person in the department using Mathematica. The cost had just escalated >> to silly levels. > > > Here's an interview with Wolfram from 1993 that touches on this point: > > ------------------------ > ... > Wolfram: There's another thing, quite honestly, > that that community has a hard time with. They > sort of hate one aspect of what I have done, > which is to take intellectual developments and > make a company out of them and sell things to > people. > DDJ: Probably not surprising, if > mathematicians are the most puristic of > scientists. > Wolfram: My own view of that, which has > hardened over the years, is, my god, that's the > right thing to do. If you look at what's > happened with TeX, for example, which went > in the other direction...well, Mathematica could > not have been brought to where it is today if it > had not been done as a commercial effort. The > amount of money that has to be spent to do all > the details of development, you just can't > support that in any other way than this > unique American idea of the entrepreneurial > company. > -- Stephen Wolfram, 1993, Doctor Dobbs > Journal Interview > ------------------------------------
I don't have a problem with them making money from the product. Let the users choose whether to use Mathematica, Sage or whatever else. But in some ways, the cost of the academic license was such that many users were using MATLAB instead, as it was much cheaper. Of course, I'm aware there are differences between MATLAB and Mathematica, but for many applications, either will do. Mathematica just got too expensive. I know the Maths department at UCL did use Mathematica a lot, but they too were looking at Maple, due to the cost of Mathematica. >> 100 MB is just plain silly. I think limiting MMA to 32-bit is silly now, >> but 100 MB is a joke. > > Yep. Here's the order form for the student version: > > http://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/magma/Ordering/order_student.shtml > > The evidently increased the limit from 100MB to 150MB :-) It has > *other* limitations too: That's a no-brainer then. Personally I've never come across anyone using Magma, but then I did not study maths at uni. > There is a recent Ph.D. thesis about Groebner basis where the author > only could afford the student version of Magma, and this directly > impacted his research. Students often push programs to their limits, so any attempt to make a student version unattractive to a commercial company by limiting features is doomed to failure IMHO. > I'm going to be in Europe for nearly 2 months *this* summer -- most of > June and July, except as scheduled here: > http://wiki.wstein.org/schedule > > I think I still have room in my schedule... Who knows, maybe I'll end > up going to London. I have number theory research friends there too. Well, if you do go to London, I'm sure Joy (joy dot marshall at sun <dot> com) would like to hear from you. Especially as Sun are sponsoring the Sage port. Sun have worked pretty closely with Wolfram Research too. I'm somewhat surprised Wolfram Research have not released a version of Mathematica for Solaris x86 for a system using Intel CPUs. Currently, an x86 system is only supported with AMD CPUs, despite me sticking some information on the internet ages ago about how to get around this - just replace some of the libraries Wolfram ship, with different versions from Sun. >> Perhaps with the economic climate like it is, more companies will look >> to free software for their needs. Perhaps there is light at the end of >> the tunnel after all. > > I get the impression that this is actually highly likely after having > gone to the discussions in our department about what we need to cut to > make ends meet now that our budget is being slashed. It seems to me one way companies could save money now. Dave --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
