I would just like to share a story, and probably an opinion as well. When I was doing my STEM undergraduate degree a couple of years ago, I took a course in which I had to use MATLAB. I won’t disclose too much information, but it was a course involving computation.
Well, we (the students) weren’t given a student/institutional license of any sort, but the course coordinator still insisted on using MATLAB. We took it as an implicit instruction to “somehow” obtain MATLAB. In the end, one guy in our class pirated it and distributed it the whole class.
Before that though, I did approach my course coordinator, asking them if it’s possible to use other software like GNU Octave, which is a clone of MATLAB. Personally I think it should also possible to use any other programming language like Python for example, since the important part is the computation part, in my opinion. They refused any discussion and did not even consider alternatives, instead basically forcing us to “obtain” MATLAB. How else? Well.
As I have said, we all pirated it in the end.
I did something quite interesting though, which is that for every quiz, assignment, and projects that we had, I’ll run the same exact MATLAB code on GNU Octave, to see if it’s compatible. And it is. It works flawlessly. There’s only one function that GNU Octave didn’t support back the (this was a couple of years ago), and even then, it wasn’t an essential feature, you could use other software for that function as well.
By the end of that semester, I had compiled almost all input/output of the MATLAB code alongside its GNU Octave’s counterpart, to demonstrate that we didn’t need to pirate MATLAB to get through this undergraduate course.
Regrettably though, I didn’t follow through. So sad!
Do you think piracy is justified in this case?
This is a case where the class is led by a moron. That person should be reported.
Piracy for the students was justified because they had no other option. But outside of this school, if I were you and I needed the software again, I’d definitely use Octave without question. (Or Python if I’m willing to learn something new.)
The point is, if you have free and open source alternatives, use them. You’ll be better off.
Removed by mod
Lol numpy & scipy is for hobbyist? Clearly you’re not in the industry.
I’m guessing he means in engineering (excluding computational). I’m a chemical engineer, and yes, MATLAB is everywhere, only few know about Octave, and python is used mostly for personal projects, I’ve never seen it in an industrial environment, apart maybe web base user interfaces, but don’t get me started with LabVIEW.
I work in Computational finance. I don’t think I’ve seen Matlab in over a decade. These days it’s 100% Python
Not familiar with MATLAB/Octave myself, but I’ve seen numpy being used on two different professional projects, both of which I was involved with. scipy gets used less often due to its niche nature, but it’s around as well.