Blog
-- Thoughts on data analysis, software
development and innovation management. Comments are welcome
Post 67
Numerical computation platform for the technical university: values to decide on a proprietary or open-source software model
30-Mar-2012
A discussion on the adequacy of a proprietary numerical computation
platform like Matlab or a free open source alternative like Octave is
an old story
already. But I feel it would be inadequate to stick with rigid
values only because of one's preference for a single particular software
development model. To me, one is just as good as the other. And
I opine with certain authority being a TA at the university who
led the migration from Matlab to Scilab for the practise sessions of
Discrete-Time Signal Processing (a graphical interface for simulating
dynamic systems was required, therefore
xcos was needed), which
is part of the Master's degree programme in Telecommunications Engineering.
Needless to say, I have a preference for open-source software, but in
an educational environment such as the university, choosing an open
platform for teaching is more of an act of responsibility than it is
of taste. Here are the reasons why
I bothered remaking from scratch the whole lot of practise sessions
(see my teaching
materials) with Scilab:
- It enables the students to fully reach to the detail of their
implementations from all analysis perspectives. This is the
essence of hacking
in the end, which in turn was born at MIT,
one of the most prestigious technology universities in the
world.
- It saves students (and the university) a deal of money as they are
not forced to buy a proprietary software licence for conducting
the lab experiments (the over-dimensioned commercial product
is simply not necessary).
- It does not entice the students to commit the illegal activity of
software piracy through breaking the contract they are forced to
accept with a proprietary software license.
With these arguments I don't mean that Matlab is a bad product at all in
any sense! On the contrary, as long as people acquire it,
I assume it must provide some differentiated
solutions for specific needs. But in an university environment, where the
gist of a technical class is teaching off-the-shelf methods to
fledgling engineers, open-source software packages like Octave, Scilab or
SciPy, offer high quality numerical computation platforms that are
orders of magnitude more powerful than it is needed. What is more, I have
used them myself for more serious computing tasks, and in my experience,
strictly speaking, they are truly comparable to their proprietary
counterparts.
Now, while this seems to be a reasonable an sound argument (IMHO), related
companies seem to disagree and complain to the university to prevent
the publication of such opinions and to remove the teaching materials
that we instructors offer for free for the sake of education.
If such complaints are not simply dismissed as the
university is supposed to always protect the educational freedom,
students are in threat of being tangled with the monopoly dictated by
these companies (and shamefully accepted by the university). So this is
what happened to Guillem Borrell with Mathworks and the Universidad
Politecnica de Madrid. And since I share his indignation wrt this issue,
I wanted to echo his
open letter to Mathworks.
I wonder if this company will also complain to
Andrew Ng for the
similar opinions he expressed in the materials he prepared for the
Machine Learning class.
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