Last year I wrote a short article about Maxima in Poland's biggest Linux
magazine. Since then I have had a lot of questions from people who want to
use Maxima in their work. People try to use it in research, education and
industry - most of the letters came from young researchers or PhD physics
and mathematics students, some from schoolteachers and I have had a
question from a person who wanted to use it in processing hydromeheorogical
data, too.
The price of Mathematica or Maple is much too high for Poles - hardly
anyone can afford to buy a copy for personal or commercial use. As a result
many illegal copies of this software are in use in Poland, but this means
that you can neither sell nor publish your results. There is also a very
disturbing moral issue here, because no one wants to be a thieve, but the
prospect of being able to do your calculations in 3 hours, instead of
three months is sooooo tempting...
Being so advanced and powerful Maxima is a godsend. And nobody seems to
care much for its "austerity" -- it WORKS!
Let me add a word on possible target market - I think that every user of
Mathematica or Maple is also a potential user of Maxima. A large portion of
my PhD research was done with the help of Mathematica and I first learned
about Maxima when I was looking for an alternative programme, because I
wanted to check my results against some other algebra package. Also, one of
the letters I received after the publication of the article on Maxima was
from a mathematics PhD student, who wanted to test her Mathematica results.
Thanks a lot for still working on Maxima - WE NEED IT! The "price tag 0$"
is one of the most attractive characteristics of Maxima for people like
myself. I think that in time you will be one of the main players in
computer algebra. For my part, I am still going to "spread the word" and I
also plan to translate some of Maxima documentation and tutorials into
Polish.
Regards
Jarek