--- Robert Dodier <robert_dodier@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> It has been pointed out that the price of commercial
> algebra systems, while apparently steep, may not be
> a sticking point for people who will use the system
> as their primary tool. In this case, a $0 price tag
> is not much of a point in favor of Maxima.
I wonder though, how universal that case is. The only example I have
direct experience with is my undergrad physics department, where the
funding wasn't available for more copies of Mathematica, even though it
would have been very nice to have some more. In the end we wound up
using a license server, which was fine unless a) we had too many people
who needed to use it at once or b) the license server went down over
the weekend and someone needed to fire up a copy of Mathematica. We
were lucky most of the time on point a, and point b was only
occasionally an issue, but had demand scaled some more we would have
been in a tight spot. I am sure there are lots of cases where the
license cost isn't an issue, but I think there are probably at least as
many (and probably a lot more) cases where people would use/deploy such
software if they could afford it, but can't justify the costs.
> From Maxima's point of view, it might be better to
> emphasize the price to incidental or occasional
> users. I have Maxima on my Linux box, and I also
> have several other GPL'd systems which have
> commercial near-equivalents -- R, Octave, Linux
> itself, etc etc. For any one of these packages,
> the price might not be a crucial factor. But it
> is certainly true that I would probably have a
> much narrower selection of software available if
> it were all commercial.
That's more a selling point for free/open software in academics than it
is for Maxima. Maxima exists for Windows, and Mathematica exists for
Linux. I think we should encourage such use, but Maxima itself isn't
dependent on that argument.
> The "free beer & free speech" aspect of Maxima
> is probably more persuasive to people, like me,
> who are accustomed to using a large collection
> of software as a toolbox to achieve some goal
> not directly addressed by any single piece.
I really think the low cost argument is a very powerful one. The
openness of the code is also a selling point from an academic purity
standpoint. If we had a GUI as good as or better than Mathematica (I
personally think it is possible to do better) I think we could start to
gain ground. And if we encourage people to create an open database of
science labs and whatnot that use Maxima, that might rope in some
users.
Anyway, I think ultimately our worries about marketing will come in the
future, after the GUI situation is better under control. For most
student use applications, my guess is without a modern GUI we won't get
much of a second look. Since that step comes much later in the
process, I don't think we need to worry about marketing just yet.
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