4 ms·
>I don't know why people bother It's not particularly difficult to understand why. An individual home license for Mathematica is $320. An unrestricted license
by MrEldritch 8y ago
>I don't know why people bother
It's not particularly difficult to understand why.
An individual home license for Mathematica is $320.
An unrestricted license for an open-source "alternative" is $0.
To be an alternative to Mathematica, it doesn't have to be as good as Mathematica.
It just has to be useful enough that learning it is an acceptable tradeoff for "not spending $320 and becoming locked into Mathematica-specific tooling"
- pjmlp 8y agoHow times change, $320 would be considered a very cheap student price for a software package a couple of decades ago.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoWere the students rich back then? Did they pocket student loans instead of spending them on tuition? Because I can't imagine how $320 could not be crazily expensive for an average undergrad. (A decade ago, we'd just pirate the software we needed, because a tunnel to university's licensing server was both unreliable and a PITA to set up...)
- pjmlp 8y agoDepends on the country. I did buy software with student discount during high school, which means even more resource constrained than university level students. Yes there were lots of piracy with street bazaars even, but I really wanted to own proper Borland software and managed to save money for it. Those that produce software also have their own priorities, based on how they can managed to pay their bills, which given the comments here is why most software tooling shops nowadays mostly sell to enterprise customers.