# Why aren't more universities using open source?



## Spartrekus (May 23, 2019)

Hello, 

Why aren't more universities using open source?

This interesting topic of discussion is an extension, for universities, why open source is not sufficiently employed. Have fun in this interesting discussion. 

Best regards,
Sp.

Ref. https://opensource.com/article/17/6/open-source-research


----------



## rootbert (May 23, 2019)

its all about lobbyism. high ranked professors and people who manage the university very often have their friends in managemant positions in corporations. For corporations its quite incentive to sponsor technologies to universities because students will work with it, and students familiar with a product will then when they work and have a management position again choose the product they learned to cope with.

I know of various universities where this happens like this. I researched this before my studies to decide which uni I would join, and that was the reason I joined a public university ans not a private one.

Another point is, very often professors are also in management position in corporations. e.g. their career path and dissertation led to a product which then was the basis for founding a company. Students of that professor will then quite likely work with the tools of the professors company. 
This happened in a few of my courses regarding hardware design, we had to use the tool of our electrical engineering professors company, and also for vhdl design we were similarly restricted.

There are various good programs out there, but IMHO those can never be enough... the imagination of The FreeBSD Foundation/Mozilla/Linux Foundation/ Apache Foundation etc. sponsoring universities is a nice one


----------



## kpedersen (May 23, 2019)

rootbert said:


> its all about lobbyism. high ranked professors and people who manage the university very often have their friends in managemant positions in corporations.



(I recall a very similar conversation in another thread)

I agree with this and have also noticed a few additional reasons:

1) "Of course we should teach Microsoft because who doesn't use Microsoft. It is the "standard"?"
Yes... people still actually think this. Where does this idea come from? Is it similar to the stupid late 80's opinion that "No-one ever got fired for choosing IBM"?

2) The students are a little bit blinded by "brands". They would always choose Maya over Blender, MS Office over Libreoffice, Unity over Godot. They actively seem to want to use proprietary software with fancy websites and no community input. This is a form of the Stockholm syndrome.

It is extremely frustrating to teach them to use entirely open-source technologies as part of the course unit, then leave them to their own devices for two seconds (i.e for final year project), only to find that they have followed some ratty little tutorial that has got them using Microsoft Visual Studio because "it is so cool; you can right click and auto-generate an empty function body".

If we banned them from needlessly using proprietary products, we would get a poor NSS score; this would affect the success of the University; we basically have no choice. The only thing I can currently do is actively support using pirated software to ensure that I do not contribute to the dictatorship of large IT companies; whilst at the same time satisfying the student's expectations. If we can weaponise piracy to kill off these non-ethical corporations, then that is a big win.

Though in some ways it is good, it honestly is starting to separate the technical candidates from the pretenders; especially in the game development related courses. It is almost possible to predict a grade for a student entirely by their choice of technologies without needing to first look at their work.

Disclaimer: These are my personal opinions; the University I work for has no clue about my madness! Any money I "save" from piracy, I send to local charities and open-source projects that I do care about. It doesn't make it "right" in a legal sense; but I sleep very well at night!


----------



## rootbert (May 24, 2019)

kpedersen said:


> The only thing I can currently do is actively support using pirated software to ensure that I do not contribute to the dictatorship of large IT companies; whilst at the same time satisfying the student's expectations. If we can weaponise piracy to kill off these non-ethical corporations, then that is a big win.



IMHO thats the wrong weapon to fight those corporations: when you enable other people access to pirated software you in the end feed them because you help them increase their userbase. They really don't care whether its pirated software for individuals - they seek for decision makers and users to sell their products to as many companies as possible. e.g. Microsoft never really cared about pirated software - they knew that this increases the userbase and establishes a so called standard in corporations because everyone able to work with a pc more or less used Windows and Office. That was part or their plan, otherwise they would have implemented a real copy protection from day one.


----------



## sidetone (May 24, 2019)

I would like to see colleges and gradeschools use Rice University's and other contributing colleges' opensource professional textbooks: https://openstax.org/subjects.


----------



## Ordoban (May 24, 2019)

Last time I was in school (~2006), Microsoft offered generous free access to many software products to students. We only had to register to get personal license keys and to download iso images. The only restriction was that the license key fades out after we finish the school. It was allowed to use the software further, but no new installation.
A well calculated move from Microsoft, don't you think?
Kids and Students learn to use Microsoft products only and later they remain on this kind of software.
It's a bit like a drug dealer who offers free samples on the schoolyard.


----------



## Spartrekus (May 24, 2019)

kpedersen said:


> Though in some ways it is good, it honestly is starting to separate the technical candidates from the pretenders; especially in the game development related courses. It is almost possible to predict a grade for a student entirely by their choice of technologies without needing to first look at their work.


Which kind of technologies for instance?


----------



## kpedersen (May 24, 2019)

rootbert said:


> Microsoft never really cared about pirated software - they knew that this increases the userbase and establishes a so called standard in corporations



I do understand that but I still have to manage student expectations and if we leave these products out entirely they will feel that they are not learning the "industry standards".

At least by not activating a product online (and patching the DRM out of the binary instead); the company bean counters will not include that sale in their official figures.

As a developer myself; I feel developers should get paid for their work. However if I developed non-ethical software or lobbied it in unethical ways then I feel that I do not deserve to get paid and that is yet another way that I justify it to myself XD



Ordoban said:


> Last time I was in school (~2006), Microsoft offered generous free access to many software products to students.


Yes they still do The MSDNAA (Microsoft Developers Network Academic Alliance). You are right this is exactly akin to a gateway drug. Apple has also done similar by marketing their toys to students. It has generally worked; Apple has entered many places within the workplace.



Spartrekus said:


> Which kind of technologies for instance?



A good candidate will use "boring" stuff such as C++, SDL, OpenGL, CMake, Doxygen to make i.e a 2D game. It will generally be well done; include unit tests, doxygen documentation and have decent memory testing and performance profiling done to it and version control will be used throughout.

A weak candidate will basically opt for an easy route and choose Unity3D for a 2D game which also tends to imply no unit testing; no systematic documentation; zero testing and version control will almost always be drop box. Their code will then also be a mish mash of random crappy snippets copied from stack overflow and the game will rarely work. This has almost given Unity a name for itself around here as not being able to produce finished games.


----------



## Crivens (May 24, 2019)

Most of this is due to human nature. Very few want to take responsibility for others. When you have the possibility to change things, you are suddenly responsible for them. And many people can't deal with that. They don't want it.


----------



## Sevendogsbsd (May 24, 2019)

Ordoban said:


> Last time I was in school (~2006), Microsoft offered generous free access to many software products to students. We only had to register to get personal license keys and to download iso images. The only restriction was that the license key fades out after we finish the school. It was allowed to use the software further, but no new installation.
> A well calculated move from Microsoft, don't you think?
> Kids and Students learn to use Microsoft products only and later they remain on this kind of software.
> It's a bit like a drug dealer who offers free samples on the schoolyard.



Microsoft has done this many times: offered "free" operating systems to other countries so they spread their userbase. Same thing they did back in the 80's and 90's when you could only get a PC or laptop with Windows because Microsoft had agreements with hardware vendors (same thing now actually). They flooded the market, making Windows and Office the "standard" when it wasn't actually a standard but just what everyone used, mainly because they didn't know any better.

Definitely a business tactic and when I throw this out there to colleagues, I remind them that it isn't the best (quality) solution, just one that everyone uses.


----------



## ralphbsz (May 24, 2019)

The original article doesn't talk about Microsoft.  It doesn't talk about the use of free versus non-free software in classes.  It does not talk about students.

It does talk about researchers (who are professionals) using software for their own highly specialized purposes.  It points out that much of that highly specialized software is commercial and not open source, and it exhorts those researchers to use open source software instead.  The type of software it talks about is not OSes, or compilers, or computer science teaching, but specialized software that is used in laboratories.  The example it gives is software to analyze data from a tensiometer, and the author of the article is asking people to stop using commercial software, and instead use the open source software he and his research group have developed.  Fundamentally, what the article amount to: A person who has developed a certain piece of software is advertising it, and wanting other people to use it.

The author also claims that open source software offers many advantages, in this specific situation.  Personally, I find that suggestion offensive.  The people who run these research groups tend to be very intelligent, and capable of making tradeoffs; in his example he talks about academic researchers in surface chemistry, who are typically people with a PhD.  If they are using a particular software, they probably do that for good reasons.  Dragging these deeply technical decisions into the realm of superficial politics doesn't help anyone.


----------



## tingo (May 25, 2019)

Unfortunately, being "intelligent" isn't the same as having knowledge about subjects outside of a persons (narrow) field of academic research. One would hope that a person with academic background also knows quite a bit about other things (aka is "broad-minded" and have a wide field of interests) instead of being narrow-minded and only interested in what he or she does. I have met people of both "persuasions" over the years. I still hope that there are more broad-minded than narrow-minded people in the world. 

Oh, and anyone is free to feel offended by my statement, of course.


----------



## Crivens (May 25, 2019)

Old saying: specialists learn more and more over less and less until they know everything about nothing.

Sometimes I wonder if that is a fermi filter.


----------



## Nicola Mingotti (May 25, 2019)

According to my experience is various universities and research institutes the story is this. While  science departments usually are very much into open source, expecially Linux and all open stuff they can get. Engineering depts. are very much into Windows. 

Humanities, from what i heard, use just Windows because people there never needs (are able to use) stuff diverging from MS-Office suite. 

Let's forget Humanities and focus on Engineering. In Enginerring you are faced with real world problems that many people want to solve. So, let's start easy, CAD, try to find a professional one that works in Linux. It does not exist.  Then, I remember vaguely some very specialized software for designing digital circuits. There are specific tools which have driver and guess what, 90% of times driver is only for Windows (eg Oscilloscopes, 3d printers, CNC etc. ). So the point is, for Engineers there is plenty of companies out there that are willing to invest in build professinal software/devices/drivers to solve their problem. Because they are regular building-stuff problems, that have a market.

After that. You are an Engineer, you are supposed to go out of school and don't, in the majority of cases, do rearch or teaching, you are supposed to go out and build working stuff for the market. Like it or not the market runs Windows, somebody uses MacOS. Again,  MacOS has not a pro CAD !


----------



## Spartrekus (May 25, 2019)

Actually...
What about if state votes against opensource in future? today there is some support but who knows the future.
This would be beneficial for big corporates. US or EU would definitely support it.
The good reason would be that it is imperative, because there are too much hackers, internet crimes, ... and so on.
Politicians could vote a new law.

It would not be surprising that at the end, the state monitors and rules you and your life (so said democratically), in some 20 years.


----------



## Nicola Mingotti (May 26, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Actually...
> What about if state votes against opensource in future? today there is some support but who knows the future.
> This would be beneficial for big corporates. US or EU would definitely support it.
> The good reason would be that it is imperative, because there are too much hackers, internet crimes, ... and so on.
> ...



and what if "the state" votes against forums ? 

if you don't live in a dictatorship you can 1) vote against them 2) join other people who think like you and start the opposition.


----------



## sidetone (May 26, 2019)

Crivens said:


> Most of this is due to human nature. Very few want to take responsibility for others. When you have the possibility to change things, you are suddenly responsible for them. And many people can't deal with that. They don't want it.


Those who don't lift a finger or don't attempt to help, can't blame. Those who are incompetent that make things worse of anything they involve in also can't blame. Some people are so incompetent, the best way they can help, is to get the hell out of the way.


----------



## badbrain (May 26, 2019)

sidetone said:


> Those who don't lift a finger or don't attempt to help, can't blame. Those who are incompetent that make things worse of anything they involve in also can't blame. Some people are so incompetent, the best way they can help, is to get the hell out of the way.


Oops. Did you mention me? It's perfectly matched


----------



## badbrain (May 26, 2019)

I don't care about open source or not. I only care if it cheap enough to buy a personal licence and good enough to solve the problems. Recently I tried to plot 3D parametric surface equation and guest what? All of the free online graph plotter sucks and only Wolfram Alpha gives me what I want. The key is a product really helps solving the problems they aimed to solve regardless of open source or cross platform bla bla


----------



## Spartrekus (May 26, 2019)

badbrain said:


> I don't care about open source or not. I only care if it cheap enough to buy a personal licence and good enough to solve the problems. Recently I tried to plot 3D parametric surface equation and guest what? All of the free online graph plotter sucks and only Wolfram Alpha gives me what I want. The key is a product really helps solving the problems they aimed to solve regardless of open source or cross platform bla bla



Could maxima with gnuplot solve your graphical problem?


			https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3496/3290044993_def699b494_o.png


----------



## badbrain (May 26, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Could maxima with gnuplot solve your graphical problem?
> 
> 
> https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3496/3290044993_def699b494_o.png


As I said above. Online plot graph services. It's a bad example to demonstrate my thoughts, though.


----------



## sidetone (May 26, 2019)

badbrain said:


> Oops. Did you mention me? It's perfectly matched


No. That wasn't about anyone here. That was about my personal frustration in real life.


----------



## Nicola Mingotti (May 26, 2019)

guys, you should really try Mathematica, it is great piece of software. To get things done !

there are bad things i could say about it, but, in full honesty, comparing to maxima (which has all my simpathy) it is not fair. It is like comparing the latest iPhone with a $100 Android.


----------



## badbrain (May 26, 2019)

sidetone said:


> No. That wasn't about anyone here. That was about my personal frustration in real life.


Tks. I myself should stop acting like that. Didn't research thoroughly, don't do anything but go to this forum (and many other forums) only to rant. It's nothing wrong if people associated me with a troll


----------



## Deleted member 9563 (May 26, 2019)

I think it comes down to whether or not one is prepared to stand behind the wider world consequences of one's actions. Choosing and using software is an action. The whole idea of ethics in business and  administration does not appeal to everybody.

My opinion is that the argument that one NEEDS any particular software is not a legitimate one. You don't NEED anything. Everything beyond food and survival basics is optional. You certainly don't need a computer. That's a choice.

I basically take the high road and say a firm NO to everything that does not meet my personal ethics. However, I must say that when it comes to computers, being an amateur has a terrific advantage.


----------



## Spartrekus (May 26, 2019)

Nicola Mingotti said:


> guys, you should really try Mathematica, it is great piece of software. To get things done !



Maybe a good alternative is to use tinyexpr, to be used maybe with gnuplot, it is more powerful and you will learn C++. 








						GitHub - codeplea/tinyexpr: tiny recursive descent expression parser, compiler, and evaluation engine for math expressions
					

tiny recursive descent expression parser, compiler, and evaluation engine for math expressions - GitHub - codeplea/tinyexpr: tiny recursive descent expression parser, compiler, and evaluation engin...




					github.com


----------



## Nicola Mingotti (May 26, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Maybe a good alternative is to use tinyexpr, to be used maybe with gnuplot, it is more powerful and you will learn C++.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



oh Lord, no, we are far Spartrekus, in Mathamtica you can do things you can't dream of with the tools you are proposing. I have seen physicists working on Mathematica full day, for years ! Except the time to write the papers, for that LaTex is the tool (it is the best and it is open source). 

I have worked with it, for a long time. For testing a new idea that has something to do with applied mathematics it is the best. Because it is 'holistic tool', Wolfram has stolen the fundamental idea of Lisp (without giving credit) and built a fanstastic Lisp with a beautiful interface. 

I find a computer which still has a license i will write a short demo of what you can do


----------



## Spartrekus (May 26, 2019)

Nicola Mingotti said:


> oh Lord, no, we are far Spartrekus, in Mathamtica you can do things you can't dream of with the tools you are proposing. I have seen physicists working on Mathematica full day, for years ! Except the time to write the papers, for that LaTex is the tool (it is the best and it is open source).
> 
> I have worked with it, for a long time. For testing a new idea that has something to do with applied mathematics it is the best. Because it is 'holistic tool', Wolfram has stolen the fundamental idea of Lisp (without giving credit) and built a fanstastic Lisp with a beautiful interface.
> 
> I find a computer which still has a license i will write a short demo of what you can do



It's true, mathematica is an excellent companion. What about open source alternative for it?
Even the CAS is not from Wolfram.  

It depends the level of complexity, when it starts to be really hard, non linear dynamical systems with about >= 50-60 variables, then, mathematica will be useless. Then, C++ comes in!


----------



## Nicola Mingotti (May 26, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> It's true, mathematica is an excellent companion. What about open source alternative for it?
> Even the CAS is not from Wolfram.


As of today JupyterLab has a good momentum. I see people using it in my building, it is cool. It is promising. I guess as symbolic calculus capabilites we are still far from Mathematica/Maple. Also, forget the "holistic stuff", here there are separate blocks that do separate things (GUI, the server web, the browser and the computation engine [python or R or Ruby or else] ).



Spartrekus said:


> It depends the level of complexity, when it starts to be really hard, non linear dynamical systems with about >= 50-60 variables, then, mathematica will be useless. Then, C++ comes in!


Well, it is true that once you want speed nothing can stand near a good written C or Fotran code. Once you write in C  the problem must be definitely well understood. But i must say, for what i see from my collegues, now a big part of hard numerical code is made in Python first, then if it turns out it is not fast enough, go for C. Then it can go for FPGA or GPU for further optimizations.


----------



## badbrain (May 26, 2019)

Err it seemed both Maple and Mathematica were written in Java...


----------



## Nicola Mingotti (May 26, 2019)

badbrain said:


> Err it seemed both Maple and Mathematica were written in Java...



No, who told you that ? The UI is Java for Maple and C/C++ for Mathematica... And you can well see the difference when you run them.  (p.s. my data may be a bit old, it is a few years i don't use each of the sofware .... i should need to check in an old computer with the licenses, if you are really interested  on this detail let me know.)

In general Wolfram has spent a lot of effort on the interface, Maple tries to close the gap but has put considerably less resources in that. 

If you check wikipedia you can see that both project are older than Java, wikipedia, and the Web.


----------



## ShelLuser (May 26, 2019)

Apologies but I didn't read the entire thread.

My take: they use what works best for them. Just because something is "open source" doesn't automatically make it superior to other products. A few months ago I did a thorough comparison between the latest Libre Office and Microsoft Office 2016, while carefully taking my bias into consideration.

So basically I compared a rather recent LibreOffice build (6.16 iirc, so released this year) with Microsoft Office 2016 which was a lot older; released in 2015. For general purposes Libre Office was just fine. But the very moment you started to demand a little bit more then things got quickly turned around; for a professional user LibreOffice left a lot to desire.

For example: Ever since MS Office 2010 (even older) I can set up text snippets and save them as text blocks which I can then quickly insert in my document. I can even save these blocks as part of a template. I can't begin to tell you how much time this can save...  especially in combination with some macros. I used to set up invoices solely using these building blocks, and they got inserted by pressing specific key combinations.

A feature MS Office has supported since 2012 but which LibreOffice still doesn't have in 2019. 

When writing feature requests, documentation and even reviews it has become important to be very careful with your sources. As such it's not uncommon to set up a collection of resources which you either quoted, used as an information resource or which influenced you. Fully supported by MS Office 2016 but an unknown feature in LibreOffice.

In Office (Word) the language I use is detected automatically thus allowing me to mix Dutch, English and German in a document while my spell checker will have no issues with either of these languages. Fully automatic. In LibreOffice I have to specifically designate such areas.

If I'm writing about a specific topic and I need some global details about it I can use Wikipedia as an automated source to look up the topic I'm working on. So: I select a keyword, click the wikipedia icon and I get a side window which shows the wikipedia page about that topic, allowing me to look into general aspects.

.. you guessed it.


Now.. don't get me wrong here. I'm pretty sure that it looks as if I'm talking down on LibreOffice, but I'm not. It's an impressive project and most definitely a solid alternative for MS Office. However... I _am_ saying that for powerusers which need to get work done and where time = money there's a really big chance that LibreOffice simply won't cut it.

To put it very blunt and direct: MS Office has expanded and improved their feature set over the years. With the latest 2019 release (which I have on my laptop, but my experience is still limited) you can even translate pieces of text within your editor "just like that". But LibreOffice didn't have any of this. There are improvements on existing features, sure, but there really isn't _that_ much new in comparison to a version from, say, 2 years ago. And with 'new' I'm not referring to features which got introduced and pushed by the devs but which are actually useful for powerplayers.

With all due respect, but when I see a comparison chart between LibreOffice & MS Office (on the LibreOffice website) then I cannot help but grin when I notice that they even highlight the fact that LibreOffice still supports ancient graphic formats such as .PCX whereas MS Office does not. Yes, it's a difference in features but... is it really that much important to include it into a comparison?

And that, in my opinion, also scratches the whole problem at hand. I can imagine that a developer could be proud of the fact that LibreOffice supports a ton of graphical formats, I really do. But... if you stop to think as a developer and approach the situation as a user... then seriously: is it really all that important?  Ton's of Office users don't even _know_ what kind of format they're working with because Microsoft is stupid enough to hide file extensions by default on Windows.


Just because it's "open source" doesn't mean it's superior by design. Germany has taught us as much when a city (which name I forgot) decided to move the entire administration to Open Source solutions. They lasted 4 or 5 years and then it went downhill. _fast_.

Much, of not most, open source software is made by developers, _for_ developers. Most developers have a really hard time imagining what a user might want, and if they can imagine as much then it's also often met with a bit of disdain because... "Just let them press F1 for help and read up!".  Wake up call: it doesn't work that way in the commercial business.

... which is exactly the kind of business universities are preparing their students for, is it not?

</rant>


----------



## rootbert (May 26, 2019)

ShelLuser said:


> Just because it's "open source" doesn't mean it's superior by design. Germany has taught us as much when a city (which name I forgot) decided to move the entire administration to Open Source solutions. They lasted 4 or 5 years and then it went downhill. _fast_.



It was Munich. However, the reason for failure was not a technical one. Politics, bad management and lobbyism was the reason they let the project down. To sum up: Microsoft promised the mayor to build a central office and generating lots of jobs so the mayor let down the project. Not all programs were migrated from Windows os to a modern OS independent web applicatiin architecture. Microsoft managers sitting in the expertise group of course suggested to go back to their product. All in all it was a shame because it was so obvious.

The thing about MS Office vs Libreoffice is true. I never propose open source software is better per se, but IMHO being open source is a major win.

To me this is just like the environmental discussion among countries: governments have to commit to protection of the environment although there are negative effects on productivity, but all have to set the same goal. I am sure if governments started implementing open source, especially libreoffice, we would see a boost in features and catching up with commercial offers sooner.


----------



## sidetone (May 26, 2019)

I would like to see Apache Open Office take off. The last time I looked, they relied on Java, and they were working on getting rid of that. Because of licensing, LibreOffice is allowed to take improvements from Apache Open Office, but Apache Open Office can't take improvements from LibreOffice. I'll continue using Libreoffice, until Apache Open Office improves and loses Java as a required dependency.


----------



## Deleted member 9563 (May 26, 2019)

rootbert said:


> It was Munich. However, the reason for failure was not a technical one. Politics, bad management and lobbyism was the reason they let the project down. To sum up: Microsoft promised the mayor to build a central office and generating lots of jobs so the mayor let down the project. Not all programs were migrated from Windows os to a modern OS independent web applicatiin architecture. Microsoft managers sitting in the expertise group of course suggested to go back to their product. All in all it was a shame because it was so obvious.





OJ said:


> The whole idea of ethics in business and administration does not appeal to everybody.



Like I said earlier. And I'd add to that by saying that these people have no backbone and are morally reprehensible.



rootbert said:


> The thing about MS Office vs Libreoffice is true. I never propose open source software is better per se, but IMHO being open source is a major win.



I'd also agree there, particularly in the context that ShelLuser detailed above. That said, he's probably talking about 1% of users. Many others could just as easily use plain text and it would actually be an improvement to the final product.



rootbert said:


> To me this is just like the environmental discussion among countries: governments have to commit to protection of the environment although there are negative effects on productivity, but all have to set the same goal. I am sure if governments started implementing open source, especially libreoffice, we would see a boost in features and catching up with commercial offers sooner.



Open source is indeed a win, but to me the overreaching thing is not so much whether it is open source, free, or proprietary (people deserve to be paid, and a buisness needs to survive), but rather whether the company producing the software is harming the rest of the software ecosystem or not (or worse). Despicable business practices simply do not fly in my world, and I am very willing to do without in order to not support such things.


----------



## sidetone (May 26, 2019)

It would be cool if more colleges used FreeBSD. The IT department would have to upgrade it every or every other semester.


----------



## fernandel (May 27, 2019)

I am LibreOffice user and for mwhat I need is enough. At work we use Adobe PDF writer but there are many genetics analyzers which run on Linux. Also Python and R are very common in genetics research.  Also in microbioligy was antibiogram tester which run on Unix with CDE . I think now is everything on Windows.
Both GIMP, Blender which I know more are IMO very good opensource applications.


----------



## Nicola Mingotti (May 27, 2019)

in the end, it is not really opensource that makes the difference, and less then less the free (as in beer) status. if a software is useful you will buy it.

IMHO, the greatest hurt is made by closed (proprietary) file format. That is, I can’t write a program that works perfectly well with Word files because Words encodes stuff in a way that is not fully disclosed. (afaik)

This i think is a political battle worth the effort: Nothing producing third party undecodable files should ever enter the public administration. Also, should not be thaught in school, because it will undermine freedom.

Freedom of opening the same document tomorow, with another program, and not be doomed a priori to get a suboptimal result.


----------



## Spartrekus (May 27, 2019)

Hej, guys, who cares about MS Office?   Because ...
There is Tex and Latex, it is far much better, it compiles after 30 years, and it is also stable ; it is as old as BSD. To say, that you can rely on it.



badbrain said:


> Err it seemed both Maple and Mathematica were written in Java...


"were"...?

younger version of maple were not on java, it was cool and fast.


----------



## Spartrekus (May 27, 2019)

Nicola Mingotti said:


> As of today JupyterLab has a good momentum. I see people using it in my building, it is cool. It is promising. I guess as symbolic calculus capabilites we are still far from Mathematica/Maple. Also, forget the "holistic stuff", here there are separate blocks that do separate things (GUI, the server web, the browser and the computation engine [python or R or Ruby or else] ).
> 
> 
> Well, it is true that once you want speed nothing can stand near a good written C or Fotran code. Once you write in C  the problem must be definitely well understood. But i must say, for what i see from my collegues, now a big part of hard numerical code is made in Python first, then if it turns out it is not fast enough, go for C. Then it can go for FPGA or GPU for further optimizations.



I don't know what is so exciting to run supercomputer simulations on python. Famous universities will get funding for that. It seems that they discover python, but it is as you said slow, very slow compared to C++.  

If the code is released to public. It is fine. However, US or EU funding will give only publications, without any source code. Basically, you can then buy the funded close-source software. Fundamental research, funded by taxes, can then contribute to close source software, no source code, and ... again business.


----------



## Lamia (Jun 9, 2019)

Seriously, if universities cannot be in control of their data, how else can they embrace FOSS? We all know   that the !FOSS lobbyists are the friends and allies of the executive management of these universities and are more willing to continuously provide funding for them as long as they continue to use their systems and software. A very large percentage of the higher institutions use Office360/SAP/etc needless to same corporations too. We live in a world were 98% of the people online use Uncle Sam services - email, phone, etc. We are all online!


----------



## Spartrekus (Jun 9, 2019)

Lamia said:


> Seriously, if universities cannot be in control of their data, how else can they embrace FOSS? We all know   that the !FOSS lobbyists are the friends and allies of the executive management of these universities and are more willing to continuously provide funding for them as long as they continue to use their systems and software. A very large percentage of the higher institutions use Office360/SAP/etc needless to same corporations too. We live in a world were 98% of the people online use Uncle Sam services - email, phone, etc. We are all online!


Office360 is at all univs yeah, indeed.
tex could be the only allowed format from universities for thesis or books. many scientific journals allow tex and some of them recommend it.


----------



## Lamia (Jun 9, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Office360 is at all univs yeah, indeed.
> tex could be the only allowed format from universities for thesis or books. many scientific journals allow tex and some of them recommend it.


This argument is not unrelated to the confiscation of scientific intellectual property in Big Brother's DMZ. That is why the BB and her allies are fighting tooth and nail to quench the blazing fire from Scihub and related efforts - libgen, etc.


----------

