We usually know about the commercial software like ANSYS, MSC NASTRAN etc.,. But there is a long debate that these commercial software as not being free making knowledge available to rich.
GNU/Linux based system are free of cost like Linux Mint, UBUNTU, Fedora etc., and they provide many software packages, made by the community using these OS, free of cost.
What do you think which type of software we should use and promote, keeping in mind that many software new versions and modules in them are made possible by academics and researchers using these software.?
Its simply means should we contribute towards free software or commercial one?
There is no doubt that commercial software is becoming more and more expensive nowadays. However in most of the cases these softwares provide only few advantages with respect to open source softwares and mostly they are related to the ease of pre and post processing they give access to, or to the availability of verified and efficient subroutines for exotic or complex materials behaviours. On the other hand the open source software, as the name implies, can be customized freely in each of its parts, thing that is possible only in a reduced way in commercial codes, also because no free compiler are available for these software (cfr Abaqus and fortran on windows based platforms). In addition, commercial and free software are essential implementation of models built from researchers that were and are payed, in majority, from public universities with public money.
Everyone admits that there is a considerable development cost for these software but honestly I do not understand why paying annual licenses on a RESTRICTED number of tokens for something that should be of public domain since payed by the community. In my opinion, software houses are just making a not reasonable amount of money just because they do not have to compete with user friendly certified open software. CAElinux distribution is a really good example of what can be done to have a good engineering environment ready to use. This collection of free software packages is one of the answers: it simplifies the installation procedures and provides support for it and technical for each of the software. The other answer is increase the contribution to the softwares themselves. The combination of these can only reduce the prize of commercial codes letting the user free to chose which one is best suited to his needs...
There is no doubt that commercial software is becoming more and more expensive nowadays. However in most of the cases these softwares provide only few advantages with respect to open source softwares and mostly they are related to the ease of pre and post processing they give access to, or to the availability of verified and efficient subroutines for exotic or complex materials behaviours. On the other hand the open source software, as the name implies, can be customized freely in each of its parts, thing that is possible only in a reduced way in commercial codes, also because no free compiler are available for these software (cfr Abaqus and fortran on windows based platforms). In addition, commercial and free software are essential implementation of models built from researchers that were and are payed, in majority, from public universities with public money.
Everyone admits that there is a considerable development cost for these software but honestly I do not understand why paying annual licenses on a RESTRICTED number of tokens for something that should be of public domain since payed by the community. In my opinion, software houses are just making a not reasonable amount of money just because they do not have to compete with user friendly certified open software. CAElinux distribution is a really good example of what can be done to have a good engineering environment ready to use. This collection of free software packages is one of the answers: it simplifies the installation procedures and provides support for it and technical for each of the software. The other answer is increase the contribution to the softwares themselves. The combination of these can only reduce the prize of commercial codes letting the user free to chose which one is best suited to his needs...
- Badges
- Science topic