Re: Mathematica and Windows
I am thankful that many of you have opinions that are thought out. I am an end user primarily. It is important to state that my goal is to program, publish, and think on general relativity, optics, quantum mechanics and in general on physics and not about if a program will work or not work for me. I do not want to spend hours and what usually amount to days if not weeks, or months (as it has taken me) trying to program in features, modules etc.. Even in our own mail group consider the thread:
While many specialized CAS that were mentioned by previous responses are great for theoretical mathematicians I am a physicist. You could say "go program it yourself" but to me this seams incredibly unrealistic. To me, and this is my overarching point, GNU fails to provide an end product that parallels Mathematica, or Maple and with the Linux community's resources this should not be. What are these proprietary software? They are software that are friendly, good looking, and useful to most users who use them. Is this a problem? Is this an aspect of software that Linux developers want to do away with? I can't imagine it is.
You say, "then go buy the proprietary software if you need it so badly". My objection to this analysis is the completely realizable GNU CAS with more features and better presentation than either of these two CAS. Why should I believe that this is possible? Because there is an incredible amount of talent in the Linux community and there are so many of us. The fact that this and other software is not available though - almost on a global scale of GNU software - make me beg the question, "Why isn't there nice looking, well behaved, feature rich scientific software that works upon installation in the Linux community?".
I am willing to pay a great deal of time - and have done so already - for intellectual freedom in software but it does not have to be this way and I don't understand why it is. I am simply asking people to work together and make something that will blow Mathematica and other proprietary software suites away not just in intellectual freedom but in ease of use, and a features. I think Open Office has done this but then again they are not just for Linux as their software works on all OSs.
Debian and Linux should be better than other OSs i.e. Mac. and XP because of their philosophy in almost every area and I do not see this. Mathematica and Maple are examples of what I do not see.
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