Mathematica 6 Launched 222
Ed Pegg writes "Wolfram Research has just released Mathematica 6. That link, in addition to the usual 'dramatic breakthrough' material, has an amazing flash banner that simultaneously shows a thousand mathematical demonstrations all at once. The animations came from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, a free service with 1200+ dynamically interactive examples of math, science, and physics, all with code. For the product itself, much is new or improved, with built-in math databases, improved visualizations, and more."
Summarizing the summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm torn... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Can't anyone create a GNU version of Mathematic (Score:2, Insightful)
And I understand that if it were Open or Free that it could be the product of many free months of effort and be a win for its users, but the notion that hundreds of dollars for software is always unreasonable(it may not ever be preferable...) is a bit tiresome.
Re:I'm torn... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's this mindset...this "OSS is holy....just because" group-think that keeps OSS from truly gaining traction with mainstream users. It's the community's insular nature, lack of interest in how software is actually used by people, and general "We know better, so there" attitude that keeps the whole concept sidelined.
Marking my question as a troll might make the moderators feel like they've done something useful. All they've really done, though, is show their ignorance and their desire to not have to look at the real issues. They'd rather just hold on to their belief of "it's just better....because!"
Re:I'm torn... (Score:3, Insightful)
All I can say is that I learned my lesson. Since I finished my PhD work I have moved exclusively to linux and tried to limit commercial lockin as much as possible.
Shilling (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I'm torn... (Score:3, Insightful)
So yes, speaking from experience I can say that, in general, an OSS program does have better support on Linux than a closed source app does. If Mathematica were open source, he wouldn't have had that problem in the first place. Sure if he were the first person to come across a bug, he would not have been able to quickly fix it, but that's not the point. The point is the bug would have been found and fixed a long time ago before he even came across it.
And it's not my fault that you didn't comprehend his problem with the liscensing. It seemed pretty clear to me.