[earthscienceman]

Make sense, cheers from an American scientist ! I purchased the hard copy despite it being from Amazon, although I understand the logistics at play there.

J'étais à Polytechnique à Paris pendant deux ans, j'aimerais que les Américains soient aussi au logiciel "Open Source" que les Français

[rougier]

I tried to avoid Amazon and even found a French printers but the mailing costs were too high outside Europe.

[kergonath]

One of the reasons why we do it is that we don’t have the same funding lying around. And also a different attitude towards intellectual property and a strong dislike of being effectively hostage of a for-profit software company. At least that’s the feeling around here (not X, but close enough to meet people there for lunch :) ).

It is still more difficult than we’d like to get funded for Open Source development (as a non-CS scientist), but there have been some encouraging noise recently, and some political will to reduce our reliance on black-box commercial software.