On 3 Mar 2006 17:33:31 -0800 "sturlamolden" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 1. Time is money. Time is the only thing that a scientist > cannot afford to lose. Licensing fees for Matlab is not an > issue. If we can spend $1,000,000 on specialised equipment > we can pay whatever Mathworks or Lahey charges as well. > However, time spent programming are an issue. (As are time > time spend learning a new language.)
"that man speaks for himself!" ;-) Seriously, this depends on the lab. If you're working for a monster pharmaceutical corp or on a military contract on "applied" science (meaning there is a definitely payback expected), then you likely have money to burn. People working in a academic or non-profit lab on "unsexy"/"pure" science, likely don't. Remember that site-licensing usually works on some kind of "per seat" basis (even if you are lucky enough *not* to have a "license server" that constantly tracks usage in order to deny service if and when N+1 users try to use the system, the fee the site fee is still based on the number of expected users). The last science facility I worked at was in considerable debt to a proprietary scientific software producer and struggling to pay the bills. The result was that they had fewer licenses than they wanted and many people simply couldn't use the software when they wanted. I'm not sure what happened in the end, because I left for unrelated reasons before all of that got sorted out, but Python (with a suitable array of add-ons) was definitely on the short-list of replacement software (and partly because I was trying to sell people on it, of course). In fact, if I had one complaint about Python, it was the "with a suitable array of add-ons" caveat. The proprietary alternative had all of that rolled into one package (abeit it glopped into one massive and arcane namespace), whereas there was no "Python Data Language" or whatever that would include all that in one named package that everyone could recognize (I suppose SciPy is trying to achieve that). For similar reasons, Space Telescope Science Institute decided to go full tilt into python development -- they created "numarray" and "pyraf", and they are the ones paying for the "chaco" development contract. Which brings up another point -- whereas with proprietary software (and stuff written using it, like the IDL astronomy library) can leave you with an enormous investment in stuff you can't use, free software development can often be just as cheap, and you get to keep what you make. At one point, I was seriously thinking about trying to write some kind of translator to convert those IDL libs into python libs (quixotic of me?). So why rent when you can own? Scientists certainly do understand all that bit about "seeing further" because you're "standing on the shoulders of giants". With proprietary software, the giants keep getting shot out from under you, which tends to make things a bit harder to keep up with. Cheers, Terry -- Terry Hancock ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
