foil on benefits of octave over matlab

[Michael Creel]

On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
<jordigh at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/8/3 Michael Creel <michael.creel at uab.es>:
>> One advantage is that you can run N copies on a cluster without having
>> to buy N licenses. When N gets large, this is pretty important if your
>> budget is limited.
>
> I am not sure where Bharat Pathak resides, but if it's India, my guess
> is that they don't take copyright law too seriously over there, and in
> particular, they probably use unlicensed copies of Matlab. Money then
> is hardly ever an important factor when considering what software to
> use (and I know that in my own CIMAT [http://www.cimat.mx] such is the
> case). Octave has to shine on its technical merits alone. Which I
> think it does, and a large part of those merits is full availability
> of source.
>
> - Jordi G. H.
>

I applied for running a project on the Marenostrum supercomputer in
Barcelona, with plans to run several hundred Octaves simultaneously.
Doing the same with Matlab would certainly not be possible with my
research budget, and I'm pretty sure that the administrators would not
allow unlicensed software to be run. Of course, the reason I'm using
Octave in the first place is its quality and also the fact that its
free software. However, the free as in free beer aspect is an
important advantage in some cases, too. Portability of a project from
a small cluster to a large one that enforces licensing is a lot easier
if you use free software.
Cheers, M.