In my experience, the math community is a very lumpy peanut butter... People use matlab, mathematica or sage depending largely on what was easily available and usable when they were in grad school, and or what their colleagues and collaborators were using. So some areas end up with lots of Matlab plugins, and other freedom-loving folks work in sage, slowly winning others to the cause with the promise of open source.
- Research mathematicians often use Sage not just because they are "freedom-loving folks", but because their research fundamentally demands that they can see, modify and extend the source code of the software they are using to do computations, and in many cases this simply isn't possible with commercial options.
> Research mathematicians often use Sage not just because they are "freedom-loving folks", but because their research fundamentally demands that they can see, modify and extend the source code of the software they are using to do computations, and in many cases this simply isn't possible with commercial options.
First of all IANAL not an expert on free software nor is any of this legal advice. Also this post is a bit tangential to the OP topic as it talks mostly about free software. Seeing modifying and extending the source code is exactly what free software is about. If you need or want that then you would often appreciate the free software movement. Free software can be commercial it just usually comes with some form of support or more looser licensing options that you would pay for in order to use it in a closed source product. Really I mainly say this to mention that free software is not free as in price but free as in freedom to see, change, and modify as you see fit. (I assume the parent poster already knew most of this and what I’m about to say by his use of ‘just, but I wanted to make this point more clear to anyone else who may not understand the purpose of free software.) It has taken me a while to understand the ethos, pathos, and logos of the whole free software movement and I’m sure there’s a whole lot more I could learn about it, but I am convinced it is a very necessary and good thing. It has troubled me that I can’t just throw in a GPL licensed software into a commercial product willy-nilly, but I appreciate what free software has accomplished due to it’s principles towards that freedom mentioned above and that is why I think it has accomplished them. I couldn’t imagine a world without Linux and other nice free softwares. I think without the principle of freedom that free software sticks to and has mandated in its licensing has freed a lot of developers that buy into that message a lot less fear that their work will be taken over by some who don’t value that freedom to see, change, and modify the software. I think in that sense those scientists who want the ability for those and themselves in the future to see modify and extend software are very much “freedom-loving folks”.