Re: MuPAD is too expensive / Axiom is free

>>>Microsoft Windows XP is free to my institution. The cost to
>>>install it is half a day of labor.
>>>
>>>Maxima from sourceforge is free. The cost (to me) to download it
>>>and install it is low because it comes in an install.exe.
>>>
>>>I think Axiom requires linux. The cost of installing linux,
>>>if you haven't done so already... ?
>>
>> I find this logic extremely starnge. Windows XP Home Edition costs
>> 260$.
>
> No, its cost depends on who you are and where. As I said, for
> me, WinXP is free because of a site license.

This said, it means that WinXP is not free for you: your institution pays
a site license which are money which are in any case subtracted from the
overall budget, that is you give up to something else in order to use
WinXP.
Even in the case that your site license is "offered" by Microsoft, you
should not use "free" but "free of charge", since you are not free to do
anything you want with that software, but use it.
This may seems an unimportant thing to you, but it can make a big
difference for IT students willing to discover how OSs works and how to
start "playing" with them.
Moreover, if you ask your students to use a particular software which runs
only under winxp for their homeworks (or a software which runs also under
linux but for which you have to pay, like Mathematica), you _force_
your students to buy a license of winxp (or Mathematica, or the like)

This is why MS and other software houses give very low cost, even free
of charge, licenses to educational insitutions...

> For that matter, since someone in my department seems
> to have a site license, Mathematica is free to me.

Even a site license for Mathematica is really not free of charge at all.
You are _really_ giving up something else in order to use it, even if you
don't realize it.

> I suspect that one can buy "cracked" versions of WinXP and
> Mathematica on the streets in Hong Kong for very little money.

We are talking about legal things!

> I can, on principle, reject these programs because
> they are not available at zero cost to everyone else, and therefore
> I should not use them either. But still, their cost is zero to me.

But not to your students...


>> This is by far too expensive for me. Therefore, I use Linux,
>> which is free. Compiling maxima and axiom from sources is equally
>> easy for me (except the fact that compiling axiom requires *really*
>> much cpu time...)
>
> Many things are free if you do not value your personal time.

Well, compiling a program is cpu time, not personal time. From the user
user point of view, it is just a matter of typing

../configure && make && make install

or little more. After this, you just sit down and, if your time is really
valueless, you just look all nice letters running on you monitor, in a
"Matrix" fashion...
Otherway, I can list you a lot of interesting things that can be done
during the compilation of axiom ;-)))

BTW, writing this mail took me MUCH longer than it took me (I mean,
personal time) to compile and install axiom!

>> That said, there is a port of axiom to Windows, too.
>
> Yes there is! I tried it out. It runs in an MS-DOS command window
> by default. So the point -- availability on Windows, free,
> easy to install--- this is true, and Axiom is low cost, given an
> internet connection to download.

So it seems that the only point which prevents you from using axiom is an
internet connection. But you started saying that this is not a problem for
you with maxima (which, in any case, I consider an acceptable choice,
since it is GPL).

Moreover, consider that once you downloaded it you can freely
redistribute it to your students, either the linux or the win version.
Or you could also provide them a dvd with a full os (which needs no
installation) and lots of computational software to be run on any pc
(see quantian:
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html
even if, we must recognize, the software is not in its latest version).

Note that I am not saying that you should not use windows. This is your
choice. But the OS has nothing to do (if we are only talking about CASs)
with the software you use for doing CA.
What I want to stress, is that you must be aware of the implications of
your choices: if you use something you force your students
to pay for some software, if you use other things you can provide the
same knowledge freely (and free of charge).

>From this point of view, mupad was a sort of compromise, up to now: not
free from the software point of view, but free of charge at least for
personal/education use.

This was enough to allow me to use it my lectures. Now, I regret that I
must give it up and switch to something else. I will go back to axiom,
which was my first love: I used it for my PhD thesis. At the time, we had
only one licence on a server which could only run 2 sessions. Luckly
enough, we were only 2 persons to use it... ;-)
But when I needed a software to redistribute to students, I had to
switch to something different, since it was commercial (and expensive!).
I have chosen mupad.
Since then axiom became free and it is some time that I was considering
reconverting back to it, but I didn't do it for laziness. Now these news
from mupad make me think that time has come...
Sorry for mupad team :-(((

Fabio

.

Relevant Pages
Quantcast