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Academic license discountsAcademic license discountsPosted May 19, 2012 18:17 UTC (Sat) by SimonO (subscriber, #56318)Parent article: A scientific basis for Open Source Software
I doubt there's much negative feelings here regarding applying the open source way to science, but I'd like to mention the prevalent use of educational discounts, which has a terrible side effect of getting students hooked to specific software which they will then "need" when starting in a commercial job.
In the Netherlands, this way of discounting to the point of giving away to students of whatever level has turned the country in a 99% windows place.
So this is just the first step, they should further require that no proprietary software is necessary to reproduce the results. Such a rule would probably motivate (i.e. get money for) the people from FieldTrip to port it to Python or Octave, whichever is easiest.
/Simon
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Academic license discounts Posted May 20, 2012 18:31 UTC (Sun) by theophrastus (guest, #80847) [Link]
hear-hear! (and i watched it all happen like a ballet between a business suit and tweed jacket)
my own sad attempt to challenge this trend took the form of the (for example) shiny new post-doc who was enthusing over the graphing/presentation abilities of excel/powerpoint ("now you can add *sound-effects* to our graphs!") was to ask: "when you graduate, and establish your wondrous biotech company (as they all were planning) wouldn't it be advantageous not to have to buy business licenses for every seat?" about half of them waved me off mumbling something about vast steel towers built of IPO funds; but a minority may've seen the advantages.... or not.
my favorite line, which i had the young man sign was: "i don't need to know the science, as long as i get the publication"
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