Re: Commercial programs in Debian
I can illustrate my experience with commercial packages for quantum mechanical
and quantum chemical calculations. There is at least one package for quantum
mechanical calculations (don't ask me the name as i am not advertising) that
is accurate, solves all problems of file type conversion, provides input to
quantum chemical calculations and reads (graphically) the output. Well, this
program (absolutely not inexpensive) is distributed with the source code.
This allows compilation (with assistance from the distributor) for your
particular environment. More importantly, the source code allows you to
change parameters - or insert new ones as soon as experimental data from,
say, IR come out - for the calculations. The latter strategy is not allowed
by imperscrutable commercial packages, which pretend you do chemistry
blindly.
This long preamble to an area (chemistry calculations) that will hardly find
anyone interested here. But I wanted to refer to the philosophy behind. In
any area, this is the only way to accept a commercial package on unix
systems. Not only for freedom problems. First of all for technical problems.
How do softerhouses survive this type of distribution? As far as university
quarters are concerned, we honor this type of distribution and pay willingly
(even for personal use) for them, and keep them strictly under the license
conditions.
Yours
francesco pietra
On Saturday 06 May 2006 09:14, Gudjon I. Gudjonsson wrote:
> Þann Föstudagur 5. maí 2006 08:32 skrifaði jmt:
> > > Sorry for the disturbion but I would like to mention some things.
> > > I have been thinking about if it was possible to set up some bug list
> > > as a kind of quality assurance for commercial programs in Debian. Most
> > > commercial programs I have seen are only said to be compatible with
> > > RedHat and sometimes SuSe.
> >
> > Mind that most commercial programs, targeted for RedHat or SuSe, are
> > generally i386 ONLY !
> >
> > Second point : commercial program editors want to rely on some king of
> > system certification ; even if what RedHat or SuSe provide is far from
> > satisfaction, it can take place in a business process, as a mention to
> > good practice.
> >
> > Third : what made Apple fortune : a very narrow hardware selection ! If a
> > commercial program had to rely on
> > - amd64
> > - nvidia
> > on top of any other hardware combination you can imagine, this list would
> > generate thousands messages a day !
> >
> > jmt
>
> Thanks for your answer
> You are most probably right in all your points but I can mention that in
> my case. I need to run the following programs:
> Cadence, Matlab, Femlab, Sonnet, ADS, ISE-Tcad and Proxecco.
> Debian is not supported by the producers of these programs but I have
> managed to make them run more or less flawlessly on my computer. I would
> rather not need to switch to SuSe nor RedHad, just for running these
> programs but when advising other people on what distribution to choose, I
> cannot say Debian because of this lack of quality assurance.
> Anyway, I see a problem with Debian that might be solved in some clever
> way but this list is perhaps not be the right forum for these ideas. If
> anyone could point out a better forum for this idea I would be happy.
>
> Regards
> Gudjon
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