On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, Michael Lorrey wrote:
> How is one to obtain Matlab for free if one is not a student or
> professor? Last I knew it was a pretty hefty license fee, which I have
You can't. I have no idea why you mention Matlab in this context.
Then why not Mathematica. Or a bandersnatch.
> no intention of paying for (and wasting the time to learn) just to work
> on this one project. I frankly disagree with the yapping about 'open
> source'. There is a difference between true open source and practical
Mike, you'd have a point if you knew what you're talking about. If you
insist on making a fool out of yourself in public, be my guest.
> open source. Something that can generally be run on a majority of
> people's PCs because of the ubiquity of a given sort of software is
> 'practical open source'. Excel spreadsheets are of this category.
Garbage. You either have the source for your application and are
practically and legally free to do with it whatever you like, or you
don't. Do you have the source for Excel? Has Redmond allowed you to give
it away for free, so I can build it on my machine? Excel is practical open
source, my ass.
> Something that is only operable/editable via a complex and hard to learn
> application that has a poor interface may be true open source, but for
What a pretty strawman you've built.
> practical purposes pose a significant barrier to entry due to its lack
> of utility to most people.
KDE, KOffice, Mozilla or StarOffice is a "complex and hard to learn
application that has a poor interface"? You're joking, right? Where
have you been the last decade?
> This is why ANY GUI will always be more practically open source than the
> freest of the free true open source command line operating systems. I
Huh? Command line Open Source crazed weasel vanilla sauce polygon?
> don't give a crap about the true open source status of the Excel source
> code. Is Spike's spreadsheet editable by myself and everyone who cares
> to participate? Yup, sure is, and MS can't own that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
> That being said, I understand there are limitations (hell, I hate having
> to due calculations in PI radians in Excel, you always have problems
> when adding and subtracting at the point the sign changes) to Excel. If
> Matlab is truly freely downloadable and easy to use, please let me know,
> but I'm not really interested in learning a whole new programming
> language just to run a spreadsheet.
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