Hi everyone, I have a topic to throw out for discussion, if anyone is interested: how many of you are using FOSS for academic or scientific computing? Have you been successful with it? Do you find yourselves fighting a tide of money, bureaucracy, etc., or is your environment more receptive to FOSS than perhaps the general public is?
I'm thinking of Numpy/Scipy here, Octave, R, etc. as alternatives to things like Matlab and SPSS. I ask because I recently moved to Philadelphia to start a job as a programmer and research coordinator in a psychology lab. I accepted the job largely because I thought I would be working in Python, writing FOSS data analysis programs that would be used both in this lab and distributed freely. As it turns out, my lab is extremely Matlab focused (which means that any code I write can't be run by anyone who doesn't pay the $$$$ for the proprietary Matlab license, unless I spend time making it compatible with Octave), and the principal investigator consistently chides me for pushing for greater Python and Octave use. (Yesterday, he said, "Your first name is Richard...but your last name's not Stallman, right?") He also has what I consider to be slightly suspect ideas about what it means to be a steward of taxpayer dollars. All of this is a little odd to me, because according to lab lore, at one time you weren't allowed to graduate if you had never compiled a kernel. Now, we're all on OS X. Have others encountered this scenario? Did you have any success pushing back? Do you have a persuasive counter-argument to the "pragmatism, not idealism" sentiment that has apparently won out here? Richard
