Re: Octave reputation

[Jordi Gutierrez Hermoso]

On 13/06/07, Aaron Birenboim <address@hidden> wrote:
> WAAAY overpriced at MatLab.

Money isn't the issue. Money is never the issue. If you really want to
use Matlab and Simulink, just get a copy from the Pirate Bay, or IRC
channels, or thereabouts. Nobody will prosecute you, and very few
people will even think it's immoral to use an unlicensed copy of
Matlab. Nobody will check the status of your Matlab license agreement
if you publish a paper in which you acknowledge your use of Matlab.

Indeed, if proprietary software really got paid as much as its license
agreements say it needs to be paid, or used as restrictively as the
same licenses say, nobody would use it. We all know it's overpriced.
Few of us have read the licenses enough to know how ridiculous their
terms are. Unlicensed copies of Matlab and the Mathworks mostly
turning a blind eye towards copyright infringements is a big reason
for why Matlab turned into an industry standard. The same goes for
many other pieces of proprietary software as industry standards, like
Photoshop.

> I would see the stability issue as real.
> The base MatLab/GnuPlot plotting is not acceptable for me.
> I have tried twice to install that new one, now part of the base I think.
> The one that uses OpenGL or Mesa or some 3D graphics library.

There is more than one plotting library for Octave that uses OpenGL,
directly or indirectly. Which one did you try? Octaviz works well
enough for me, and it's an easy download in Debian or Ubuntu (although
neither has built it yet for Octave 2.9; issues with poor VTK
documentation, I understand).

> This gives the impression of 'instability' to comercial software users.

You mean proprietary software users. You can sell Octave if you want.
Octave is commercial software.

> I am not aware of GUI toolboxes, either for MatLab or Octave.

GUIs for Octave are admittedly lacking. I think QtOctave was the
latest effort, but I don't know how far it's gotten. I personally have
little need for a GUI, but this is often brought up as a criticism
against Octave, so I see the importance of providing a GUI.

- Jordi G. H.