Date: Thu, 18 May 1995 19:01:30 -0400 (EDT) From: Peter Dufault <dufault@hda.com> To: hsu@freefall.cdrom.com (Jeffrey Hsu) Cc: chuckr@Glue.umd.edu, hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: (fwd) Re: Mma for Linux, when? Message-ID: <199505182301.TAA09455@hda.com> In-Reply-To: <199505182128.OAA18730@freefall.cdrom.com> from "Jeffrey Hsu" at May 18, 95 02:28:29 pm
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Jeffrey Hsu writes: > > > I'm gonna need Mathematica for next Spring's Diff EQ class, but I don't > > know what range of cost (rough idea?) we're talking about. > > I guess it would be roughly the same as their Windows and DOS versions, > which is $200 for the student version w/ fpu support disabled and > double? that for the full version. We'll have a much better idea > when the price of the Linux version is announced (any week now). There is so much to do. Let us choose our battles carefully. IMHO, the right thing to do is to work on our Linux emulation so that we can run the Linux Mathematica port and not try to push Wolfram to do a native FreeBSD port. Everyone planning to send a mailing off to Wolfram please stop and consider what you can do to support full Linux emulation under FreeBSD. Wolfram really doesn't want to do another port to a Unixy clone, and I don't see why we have to make them. The major distinguishing characteristic of FreeBSD versus Linux is the BSD copyright. That issue matters little to Wolfram when choosing target platforms. They have a large customer base among students who either haven't thought through BSD versus FSF, or when they have, maybe they haven't also been trying to run a business and are wondering what will happen in that potential new clients legal department when the Copyleft is presented. If the Linux users shout the loudest, fine. We can leverage off their shouts through our top notch Linux emulation. Their encumbered source is there for us to work off of. I see no reason for Linux emulation to not be GPL. Linux is working for us. I didn't expect to see Mathematica ported to a source-code-available platform. -- Peter Dufault Real Time Machine Control and Simulation HD Associates, Inc. Voice: 508 433 6936 dufault@hda.com Fax: 508 433 5267
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199505182301.TAA09455>