Jim Henderson wrote:

> The thing that's superior about OSS over proprietary is that because the 
> code is released, *if* you have the skills, you can fix it yourself.  
> I'll grant that's a big "if".
> 
> You can't do that (by definition) with closed-source software.

On the other hand, the number of people working on OSS software is 
usually determined by how "interesting" it is, whereas for CSS software 
it's determined by how much money the company has. If they have a 
crapload of money, they can quite possibly produce a better product than 
an OSS community could come up with, because they can just *hire* enough 
manpower to get the job done.

For example... I know of at least half a dozen packages which can take a 
simple algebraic formula and simplify it, possibly rearrange it, and 
maybe graph it in 2D or 3D. I know of exactly *one* package which can 
symbolically expand, factorise and compute quotients of expressions, 
symbolically integrate and differentiate, symbolically solve algebraic 
equations, differential equations, difference equations, integral 
equations, and simulateous systems of equations, graph implicit and 
parametric equations in arbitrary dimensions with configurable 
colouring, do fast numeric work, do number-theoretic stuff like compute 
Euler's phi or the Reimann zeta, take the Fourier, Laplace or 
Z-transform of equations or data, compute statistics such as [arithmetic 
/ geometric / harmonic] mean, varience, standard deviation, correlation, 
chi-squared tests, compute a specified distribution... would you like me 
to continue?

There are OSS packages that do symbolic calculations. And then there's 
Mathematica. Hypothetically, you can take an OSS package and "fix" it to 
be Mathematica. But unless you have a few million dollars to invest in 
R&D... good luck with that one. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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