Software Softy
I recently purchased a piece of software.
That’s right, I didn’t ‘borrow’ it, or use someone else’s ‘backup’. I actually bought it. It just so happens that this piece of software is central to my entire degree, and also my final year project, but nonetheless I bought it. Have the corporations won? Have they really made it that hard to pirate software that we actually have to buy it?
Imagine how much money the already overpaid software developers would get paid if everyone actually paid for their software? They would probably get paid weekly in large gold bars, and all drive Bentleys to work. No doubt the wealth of the world, and therefore a large proportion of the world’s power base, would be owned by software writers. What is this world coming to?
For those of you that care, it’s called MATLAB and is a nerdy wee program that does lots of hard calculations.
April 6th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Congratulations on your purchase, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it a lot . But seriously, MATLAB is nothing without all the expensive and non-included-in-the-student-version toolboxes. (I assume you bought the student version, considering the full version would run upwards of $10k with a decent selection of toolboxes…)
The free and open source MATLAB clones like FreeMat (my fav), GNU Octave, SciLab, or SciPy do just as well for the core Matrix manipulation stuff (and even some Simulink-like stuff), but of course don’t have all the fancy toolboxes or Simulink blocksets. If you need the fancy toolboxes, by all means use MATLAB (albeit not the student version cause it doesn’t have them toolboxes). But if you can make do with the student version, then chances are, you could also make do with the open source alternatives.
Also, I don’t think the MATLAB monoculture is healthy for the scientific community. For instance, if a peer-reviewed paper presented results from MATLAB, but some esoteric MATLAB bug caused incorrect results, the peer-reviewers would probably not catch the problem (because they reviewed the results using MATLAB), ultimately leading to incorrect conclusions being accepted as scientific fact.
Science is all about peer review, and about a community discussing and analyzing results, and building on each others results. In this way, science is very much paralleled by the ideas behind open source and Free software and the practice of open source development.
Scientists and engineers (well, good ones anyway) should question everything. They should trust other peoples results only if they can see how they were arrived at (and if there is any doubt, they should be able to repeat the experiments or calculations). In my opinion, using closed-source, proprietary software makes this impossible.
April 6th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Wow Hugo, you sure have a lot to say on that topic!
The student version came with the Control Systems Toolbox, and the Signal Processing Toolbox, both of which are of critical importance to my project. I don’t really care much about the other fancy expensive toolboxes! I don’t tend to use MATLAB for the matrix manipulation or anything like that, mainly for specialised processes to do with the analysis of Linear Time-Invariant Systems and their state-space equations (yes i know, these are matrices, but we’ll ignore that for now).
I do agree about closed-source proprietary software, but when the software is so effective, then why not use it? Especially when we are given access to it at university. I would like to think (whether it be true or not) that there are very few ‘esoteric bugs’ in MATLAB. Are there any examples of MATLAB produced results being accepted as fact when they are flawed? As with any tool I believe that one should have a firm understanding of the steps involved, and a good idea of ‘reasonable output’ from a program, before using it to verify or prove any scientific theories.
April 6th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
will went to nz and came back boring
April 6th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
I haven’t got back to Aussie yet Dave, don’t jump the gun! Maybe I was just pretending to be boring to confuse everyone!
April 6th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
you mean all this time you were pretending!!!
April 6th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
You could never be boring Will… ;P
April 6th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
he could be soft and say sttuff like he’s not going to be coming out for a while and cry about uni… boring
April 6th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Will, you are boring and that was a boring blog I have to say…but at least Hugo enjoyed it!! : )
April 6th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
Yeah I know it was boring, but paying for software is a big thing for me!! I’m a student remember?!
April 7th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
becomes very boring blog when you cut out all the funny off topic comments and persist with talking about software… surely there is something random that happened somewhere in NZ that could be more interesting than listening to you talk about buying software which anyone could have done at anytime anywhere… student or not!
plus everyone knows MATLAB is for noobs… doing the work yourself is so much more staisfrying… lol
April 7th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
yes satisfrying… as in your brian
oh and we’re finding it boring cause you’d normally use a story like this for a set up and then dazzle us with some witty random gem of information goodness that would rant us to the core or leave us begging for a larger bite of the midgley pie. bring back the sparkle, find the inner will! we don’t care what you have to do, meditate, sleep, eat, go for a run (giggles), find mr. miyagi and ask him for help (the old master… giggles once more) but will find your spark for the good of all us leaching, blogsters who have nothing better to do with their easters.
April 7th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
oh and gem, as in ping* diamond gem, not “i’ll leave home for a week and forget a charger” GeM
April 7th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
My 10 year old cousin got a hangover, is that random enough?
Hah, GeM’s a fool!
April 7th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
yeah let’s laugh at that
April 10th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
Excu-use me if i’m now too busy and important to remember the little things… !