On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 11:40:27AM +0200, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote: > On 4/10/07, Jean-Christophe Dubacq <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > >On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 12:00:08AM -0700, Sean Perry wrote: > >> I haven't seen much Debian in the last 6 years in the commercial > >> world. RH rules that roost. If people have chosen closed source, then > >> they likely are also paying for an enterprise edition of their free > >> OS too. Linux == Redhat was done in like 2000. Time to worry about > >> other things. > > > >I work in a science lab and can tell you that even though we do have > >commercial software (Matlab, Maple, CPlex and other scientific > >computation programs, some of which are at least twenty years ahead of > >any free equivalent), we do use debian and from there also use it > >elsewhere (our homes, our students' workstations, etc.). Should we > >become unable to do our daily job with Debian, yes, we would have to > >switch distributions, which would be a pity since this is a place where > >computer scientists are made. > > I'm pretty interested in knowing which programs are so advanced as to > being 20 years ahead of libre equivalents, and why, if you don't mind.
For example, CPlex (a mathematical programming optimizer) is considered much better than any free (even free as beer) program, having no equivalent for e.g. quadratic constraints problems. Maple is also considered much more advanced than Octave especially toolboxes available only in Maple. I may have exaggerated by saying 20 years, but I will not settle for less than 10. And we need those anyway to compare results obtained by one software against the other. The reason for the advance is that the most brilliant people of one small research field unite to build some software company. They recruit the most brilliant students, and can keep this for a long time (not eternally, I believe, but long enough). Maple, Cplex and Matlab all date from before 1990 where free software became (at least in france) commmon place enough so that new projects (see Scilab) would be at least partly open source. -- JCD -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
