Scientific software (non free)

Non free scientific softwares are valuable complement to the free ones. There is no real collision between the free and non free world in case of scientific softwares, due to their essentially different abilities, interests and goals. This article is an overview of the non free world.

Non free benefits

The benefits are really non free, but there is certain amount of legal guarantee in turn of the money flow from the user side to the creator side.

Here is a short list of obvious common benefits:

* If there is a mass demand on a certain kind of functionality, then it is well supported.

* As a special case of above, usually the graphics and the mass education related staffs are well grown.

* The installation of the License Manager, or typing the activation key provide sometimes a memorable success feeling.

* Some sort of stationarity, due to the lack of instant fixes, upgrades and improvements.

Wolfram Mathematica

The product of the Wolfram Research Inc. is a general purpose, programmable symbolic calculator supporting several programming paradigms. It has a "notebook interface". As of 2008, celebrating the first 20 years of Mathematica, the graphics capabilities of Mathematica are extended to make use of the contemporary sophisticated graphic processors.

Mathematica can be successfully used for the usual Calculus courses of the diverse BSc programs. While the kernel of Mathematica is durable enough and the libraries of Mathematica are well developed enough to support the much higher demands.

Mathematica Player is a free read only interface allowing a limited amount of interactive functionality. It can be used to read and interactively play the illustrating handouts prepared by a legal copy of Mathematica.

Waterloo Maple

The product of the Waterloo Maple Inc. is a general purpose, programmable symbolic calculator. It has a notebook interface. There is a Maple Reader as well, Maplesoft’s platform for DRM controlled electronic books uses the Standard Maple interface.

In the 90's, Maple had a relatively cheap pricing in the frame of campus wide licensing at big technical universities. Hence it is still wide spread among the engineers and physicist.

The language of Maple avoids the excessive use of own specialities, it is some sort of enhanced early Pascal (programming language), and it has professional successors, like the non free MuPAD and the free GAP computer algebra system.

Not only the Maple language had a considerable impact, but several third party commercial product were based on the Maple kernel up to September 2008, like MathCad, MATLAB and Scientific Workplace. But 2 out of these 3 switched from Maple to MuPAD kernel.

MuPAD

MuPAD was born to be a real computer algebra system (CAS), with a powerful multiprocessing kernel. That time it was a pioneering decision, since in the mid 90's the desktop computers have rarely several processor cores. At the beginning it was a typical university professors and student based development, in their policy somewhere between the free and non free. They were successful in catching the positive impacts of both of the free and non free worlds. Hence, on the one side is the really intelligent structure of the kernel, and on the other side the well developed system libraries.

Due to the clever kernel structure and the continuous developing of libraries, the MuPAD became a real heavy duty, multipurpose mathematical software.

On the surface, the language of MuPAD looks like a successor of Maple. But the internals and the development strategies appear to be different.

Non mathematical systems

The other, non mathematical systems are not as wide spread as the mathematical ones, because the mathematics is used for many different subjects as well, while the use of other subjects in third subjects are definitely narrower.

Yet another issue, that while quite a lot of non free systems are widely used, like the AutoCAD or ArchiCAD, but these are not natural scientific programs, even if their creations involved sophisticated knowledge. For the clarification of the notions, see the "scientific software" article.

Even the mathematics as a whole is not covered by the non free softwares, because popular mathematical softwares restrict themselves to the calculations, the algorithmically evaluable formulae, and they do not provide real mathematical logic in terms of a powerful proof engine accessible to the user.

The marketing problem with the support of physics is, that hard to imagine a general purpose and hence widely distributed software for physicists, since even the scientific knowledge is missing for the non mathematical part. Just an example: given the structure of a particular crystal and a given isotropic pressure is applied on it, then calculate the electrical resistance of it, naturally it can be anisotropic. This question is computationally extremely hard, and the scientific experiments are still in progress only. A partially general program in physics should be able to tackle thousands of similar questions. Instead of the missing non free softwares, the physicists write their own C++ programs and desperately do the experiments.

See also

* Wolfram Research Inc., Mathematica (software), and the MathWorld

* Waterloo Maple Inc., Maple (software)

* MuPAD

* Neuro Laboratory of the Scientific Software (company)