Steven, On Thursday 17 November 2005 10:53, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
...
Personally, I don't mind paying Wolfram Research to produce a powerful product, and feed a handful of talented Mathematicians. The value WRI returns to the world is far in excess of the money paid for their products.
Wolfram (the man) is an egotistical tyrant who mistreats, abuses and exploits the programmers and mathematicians he hires. Switch to an alternative. Putting money in his pocket is far worse than feeding Billy boy or any of his hired guns.
...
What do others think about the place of closed source, proprietary software running on Linux?
There's nothing wrong with it (not all classes of software have economics that will support open source, though I'm not claiming that's the case for symbolic and / or numeric mathematics packages). But as with all commercial endeavors, you should consider precisely what and whom you're supporting by patronizing any particular business. By the way, the same goes for Novell, of course. So far, I'm happy to support them, but it's by no means any kind of unconditional love thing.
Steven
Randall Schulz