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?
The fact that numerical analysis courses still shill Matlab is just incomprehensible to me. All the computer sessions can easily be done with no change of syntax using either GNU Octave or Scilab, or if one is ready to change languages, Python + NumPy. The professors who still keep shilling Matlab should be fired.
I mentioned it to a couple of friends, but I think I didn’t get it across well to them that GNU Octave is supposed to be syntactically compatible with MATLAB. Also, they’re more comfortable using established software since everybody else is using them anyway.
Speaking about numerical analysis courses, I feel like one should be able to choose what programming languages they wish; the course should just aim to teach the fundamentals/principles of numerical methods, not what language to use. I get that it is much more convenient to streamline software choice, but still, why not use Python over MATLAB for undergraduate introductory courses?
I had a numerical methods class where the prof let us do the assignments in whatever language we wanted. It was nice because 1) fuck MATLAB, and 2) I’m a shill for Julia, so I got to do all my assignments in Julia. I saw on github at least one previous student for the course had done their assignments in Fortran. I suspect the vast majority did their assignments in Python, though.
I think that’s ideal! It’s supposed to be a lesson on numerical methods, not MATLAB.
The professors who still keep shilling Matlab should be fired.
Don’t a lot of professors write their own textbooks, and then shill those to the students as mandatory? Good luck upsetting this apple cart.
I’m not sure how it works in the US but where I’m from, the way lessons are conducted are typically like this:
- Professors hand out lecture notes, typically in the PDF format. So, students will either print or just use their phones/laptops to follow along the lectures. It’s either this way, OR
- Professors will list out recommended readings for this course, and it’s up to you how you obtain the source material. Most people will probably just download the PDFs and take down notes during lectures.
- We were never required to buy any books.
So I’m personally unfamiliar with the “shilling” of textbooks which cost up to hundreds of dollars for practically the same content, which, from what I’ve heard, is quite common in US colleges. This seems to be a very strange concept to me.
I guess you are from Western or Central Europe as I am.
If professors require students to obtain some textbook, they should also be available inside the University campus for consultation.
Otherwise it was always only recommendations.
In South America too. Professorors provide PDFs and in my time even photocopies of the relevant chapters.
I’m actually from Asia. I don’t understand requiring students to purchase a certain resource, if they’re already available elsewhere, or if similar resources already exist. I mean I understand it, I just don’t like the whole system.
Depends on the professor. I had several who wrote their own books, and it was a mix of buy the book for stupid expensive and if you don’t have your own “professionally produced” copy purchased through my website or the college store, you automatically fail this course, to “you can find it on LibGen, here’s a link you should totally not follow”.
Where was that? At least the part where they force you to buy the book from their website or the college store would be illegal in the EU. (I am not a lawyer.)
California. I’m jealous of y’all’s consumer protections, here we don’t have much choice.
oh boy if we’re going to list all the corruption that takes place in academia it would never end: shilling textbooks and proprietary software (that’s the only reason Matlab survives), the usual power struggles (classic), professors forcing their phd students to add them as co-authors (again a classic, also happened to me), “anonymous” reviewers in “prestigious” journals informally conditioning the acceptance of your paper on you citing one of their papers (happened to me many times) etc…
also, give a try at Qalc’s cli mode (with an input file as a list of equations), I think it’s really really powerful. Its ability to add an unknown or unit to any expression is so much more useful than Matlab-like symbolic systems.
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not blaming op but the institution should provide licenses to the students or propose free alternatives if they exist
I see no reason to use Matlab in education nowadays: both Octave and Python provide as many features, are as easy to use, and free. The teacher could have verified or made his class accessible through Octave with minimal effort, as OP pointed out. But they wouldn’t be bothered and required all the students in their class to buy a 70€ license each.
What do you say to people whose position is “you are stealing their work; nothing is free”?
Umm actually, lots of things are free. Those who did the work got paid a salary anyway.
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I think I get that as well. I used to talk quite a bit about open-source to my friends, but looking back, it seemed quite preachy (maybe because I was quite young at the time), and it never really changed anything. This is especially the case since open-source (or free software) is a philosophical approach to technology that many people might be unfamiliar with or simply don’t care about. I just simply use open-source software, supports devs/foundations, and only will talk the necessary bits if someone asks me about it.
You already pointed out that there is a free alternative, so anyone who says “nothing is free” is a bit mentally challenged.
Yea of course but we’re talking about piracy, so when we pirate proprietary software, they’ll of object with “nothing is free, you gotta pay”. It’s either we pay for that, or fundamentally uphold piracy as some means or some ends, or use and support open-source software. Not a lot of choices, really.
If paying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing.
@PixelOfLife @mafbar Copying data never equals stealing. Using that term is either laziness or falling for the manipulative spin of intellectual property holders.
That’s an interesting perspective actually, since it gets into all sorts of weirdness and trickiness of the intellectual property concept. Perhaps because of two factors: (i) we treat digital data as fundamentally different from physical objects, and (ii) theft intuitively implies that the original object is no longer with the owner, but with piracy, you’re simply making a copy-and-paste, rather than a cut-and-paste.
In the end it’s all just a linguistics game though - you’re profiting off the work somebody did, without paying the rate they charge for it.
But that’s exactly the kind of answer you’ll get in a community focused on piracy. Most people wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t already justified piracy.
Yeah, the theft comes from stealing someone’s labour, rather than their products. But it depends on the situation though.
I hear that everywhere in here, but it doesn’t make any sense. Do you own the electricity network? Do you own the maid that clean your house? Do you own the room in the hotel? Is it justified not to pay for those services?
When you steal electricity, someone else can’t use it, the capacity is consumed. When you won’t pay the maid, he can’t get his labor and time back to use elsewhere. When you squat in a hotel room, someone else can’t use it and it needs to be cleaned afterwards.
When you “buy” a piece of software or a digital copy of media, you’re really just renting the license to use it as long as the company that rented it you feels like it.
The difference is that when you make a copy of something digital, the original is still completely intact. The thing is not consumed, you can copy that file 10,000 times on your own machine and see for yourself.
Yeah, but that piece of software didn’t came up to existence out of nowhere. Someone invested time, or paid for infrastructure to complete it. When you steal electricity, most of the cost is because of the infrastructure you used, which you will never own anyway.
I agree information should be free, as long as the generator of that information agrees with it.
Saying that, I still pirate things, not because I think I’m entitled to do it, that’s a very poor excuse.
You are right, of course, the people who labored to make the things should be compensated if they want to be.
What’s at issue is that if you own something you can do as you please with it. Once the electricity has been delivered I can charge batteries with it or power lights or give it to my neighbor for free if we agree to do so. I should be able to buy a piece of software and back it up or give it to my neighbor, or any random person I choose if I own it. I would buy much more media if I could just own it and do as I please with it, but because of DRM and the greed of companies that distribute the media most times you can only rent it. Piracy is in resurgence because it is becoming so difficult and expensive to just pay for the media.
I pay for Netflix, so I think I am entitled to whatever is on the service. If I have a copy of a Netflix show on my hard drive in 4k, am I taking something from Netflix? What about when I watch that show in VLC because I’m on an airplane? What about when I let the man next to me have a copy so he can watch it on his device?
While I have plenty of disposable income these days to spend on media, they simply do not sell the product that I want, and if I did not have the other means of accessing that content I doubt I would pay for Netflix.
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I hope the tone of my comments do not come across as negative, I am trying to illustrate my thoughts on the subject, not argue, and I find questions more illuminating than just explanations.
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edit: i guess the OP was about software and this rant doesnt really apply
Software-wise I dont pirate that because I try to only use open source software, for mostly the same reasons of disliking DRM and prefering to own things.
Paying for things these days does not grant ownership either way.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=DEP_7_gx6M8&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Of course it’s justified. If anything, your faculty should have provided the software for free!
I used to manage site licenses for a large university and these software companies really rake you over the coals. For example, Adobe and MatLab wouldn’t license software for just lab computers or to a subset of the student population. They required we purchase total headcount licenses that covered everyone at the institution. In the case of MatLab you also pick out about a dozen of the toolbox add-ons, so it becomes a difficult task of getting the faculty to rank sort all of the packages.
We ultimately ended up purchasing the licenses for the institution but I can understand an institution saying they can’t afford it and passing it on to the students in the classes that need it.
Piracy is always justified
What do you say to people that maintains the POV that it’s theft?
I call them a cuck and walk away
Theft is always justified, then, clearly!
Thanks for this, I will look at deploying Octave on our systems alongside MATLAB. I was unaware they were the same/similar package (I don’t use the software, only deploy it) and had never been asked for it.
For differences, see: https://wiki.octave.org/Differences_between_Octave_and_Matlab
Thanks for your story. I used both MATLAB and Octave, and while the language syntax is the same and most of the built in functions and basic toolbox functions are similar, Octave come short as soon as you start using graphics and more advanced toolboxes.
Can you elaborate? I looked at https://wiki.octave.org/Differences_between_Octave_and_Matlab and most stuff seemed minor.
Not the op, but syntactly they are ver similar. And so for minor things like looping over a matrix or making a plot or some calculations, It’ll be the same. Your intro numerical course will not really know the difference. It’s when you get to the packages that there’s massive divergence. Matlab really sells packages that have all sorts of libraries and gui things built in to do some advanced calculations or pre-Canned tool. They also change the package syntax from time to time. For things like signal processing or filter design, the tools reign and most scripts depend on them. Octave has a totally difference package ecosystem and syntax for loading packages.
So for basic things, you can go between the two fairly easily. For anything advanced or for 90% of scripts you download from papers, octave will not work.
Yeah, I imagine this’d be the case. Especially since MATLAB is designed for heavyweight computation in engineering industries, not merely simple looping or graphs. I’ll be honest and say that I neither use MATLAB nor GNU Octave since my work does not require it; I was just recalling a particular story during my student days that I thought would be interesting to share. For such heavy, niche and always evolving set of toolboxes and libraries, we can reasonable expect no open-source alternative will be able to “replace” MATLAB in any meaningful sense, it’s just too powerful and big.
I’m mostly okay with that though. These sorts of work are done in institutions or industries that can and should be able to afford them. It’s the reason why I don’t reasonably expect GIMP to overthrow Photoshop or Kdenlive/Openshot/Shotcut to overthrow Premiere Pro, unless somehow massive funds are channeled to their development. Rare cases like Linux or Blender or Firefox do happen, but they have massive backings.
You’re welcome!
I’d imagine that for some high-level computational work, GNU Octave may not fare that well. For an introductory computational course, I think it’s more than enough, probably? It reminds me of many other open-source projects - they may not be up to par when it comes to their proprietary counterpart.
The biggest downside I’ve seen with gnu octave is the exact same code will execute much slower
I’ve seen people mention this before. This will be troublesome if you require massive computing speed, otherwise it is still acceptable, since you’re basically using a MATLAB clone.
From a quick search, a MATLAB student license is $50 (USD, probably), which is less than most textbooks but still not nothing. Whether piracy is justified or not, I just want to point out that this is how they get you. Microsoft gives cheap Office licenses to schools and Adobe turns a blind eye to amateur piracy of Photoshop because they know that getting you comfortable with their software early means you’re more likely to pay to keep using it professionally later. I don’t know if MathWorks had a hand in the MATLAB requirement (I would bet it was just a prof who wants to stick with what they know), but good on you for trying to push for alternatives and testing against Octave.
I couldn’t agree more, this is how they get you. One of the things I miss the most about being a student is access to software. Auto desk gives you completely free access to their entire catalog as long as you’re a student. A professional license for AutoCAD or Revit will set you back $2000 a year or more, every year. However, If you work for a company they will probably pick that up but if you’re a freelancer or even if you work for a small firm, that licensing fee can be really costly.
Most schools that require Matlab in the US provide it for free to their students via their student license servers… It’s practically free for the university if they have any sort of research program at all.
Although, this might have changed… During my time a rotating student license only cost the university like 15 bucks and the university only needed enough for one class at a time usually.
Not from the US am from Ecuador . In my numerical analysis class my professor showd us how to pirate mathlab the first class and gave us a bunch of pdfs so we wouldn’t have to buy any books. I already had my bf’s uni’s licence so i didn’t do that but I did dabble with octave a bit on my Linux laptop. Piracy is so widespread in public universities here that nobody thinks about it as being wrong. Personally I always believe that piracy is the tool for the democratization of knowledge. I wouldn’t know half of the stuff I know if it wasn’t for pirated books. It’s literally the reason a lot of us in south America can scape poverty.
Based eastern European professors do the same. Doubly hilarious because there was some freshman who was afraid of being kicked out of he were to be caught pirating by probably the same professor who showed the art of pirating for those who don’t know how.
I showed the professor how to use Jackett so that was neat.
Piracy is so widespread in public universities here that nobody thinks about it as being wrong.
That’s interesting to me. So it has spread towards the public institution level, where many or most people think it’s just normal.
It’s literally the reason a lot of us in south America can scape poverty.
Probably one of the biggest examples of justified piracy. I’m not sure if it’s fully justifiable, but it is really hard to deny its benefits. One thing though, piracy as a means may be justified, but I’m unsure if it’s for the ends.
Out of curiosity, what is your field of work?
We used Matlab back where I studied and the faculty did provide the software for free through a central license server. Since internet wasn’t as prevalent and stable back then, a good chunk of students did pirate it anyway… so there’s that…
I’ve been using and continue to use SciLab and Octave privately and even at my job. It’s great for calculations, simulations and for data analysis, if you’re not doing it in dedicated tools and don’t require a neatly designed graphic interface. Where we ran into trouble was with toolboxes, hardware integration (HiL) and safety. For a business it doesn’t make sense to spend all those resources (the workers’ time and skill) to build all those tools etc. when Mathworks already does it and you’ll always be trailing them. Also as soon as you try for ‘safe’ software and are restricted to specific hardware (which is being developed and updated regularly itself), the whole process becomes way too cumbersome, while Matlab has specific toolboxes for specific hardware. And as a last point: Matlab has made alot of progress in terms of the interface and automation in the last few years, so more people can easily use it.
So there are differences but it really depends on the specific circumstances, whether they merit the price.
It’s probably the main reason why I think most open-source software will never be able to replace their proprietary counterpart: the fact that proprietary software are typically developed for either massive or highly niche industries, and so they are funded and are basically now integrated inside the ecosystem of such industries. As people use it more and more, Mathworks will develop more toolboxes with hardware integration, until it basically becomes the de facto software for that purpose (e.g. computation). I’m all for open-source software, but I don’t see a way out of it. Big companies with mega budgets can always improve their software, far outpacing any alternative open-source projects.
I don’t use MATLAB nor GNU Octave for my work, but I imagine that the hardware that I’ll operate on probably require MATLAB, and so there’s no incentive for me to use GNU Octave, especially if it has poor hardware support or lack of toolboxes or whatever such issues. This is a natural consequence of open-source alternatives being built from scratch typically with volunteers. That’s insane to me that GNU Octave is still somewhat usable for some basic computational work.
No question, matlab isn’t making their money off students, they make money when your work has to buy you a license, where it costs $1k a head
It’s $1K per head?
Yeah, $940 for a standard license (per year) https://www.mathworks.com/pricing-licensing.html
…per year?
Yep. A commercial license is $940 a year, and as far as I understand you need a separate license for each person using it.
Well, you were definitely way smarter than me, since I tried to do exactly the same thing two years ago but I couldn’t make for the life of me GNU Octave to behave anywhere similar to Matlab, so instead I created a virtual machine.
Congratulations, my friend!
Well, one context that I left out was that the course was pretty simple. We learned some basic loops, graphing, matrix operations, and writing some basic scripts to solve some problems. If you need a higher level functionality, then you’d probably struggle with GNU Octave, I don’t know.
There’s a reason why they insist that you all get MATLAB, and it’s because of compatibility. Like you’ve mentioned in your story, there’s one function that wasn’t working on Octave. If they don’t standardise and let every student decide themselves which software they want to use, every different software will probably have different incompatibility and different functions will be broken on different software and a lot of resources would need to be spent on debugging for all the different softwares out there.
There’s no reason that standard should be MATLAB though.
There’s no reason that standard should be MATLAB though.
I can’t speak to OP’s field, but in my field (automotive and electrical engineering) and even within my company, MATLAB and Simulink are heavily used. The reason it’s the standard is that it’s an industry standard. MATLAB on my resume almost certainly got me the foot in the door for my first job.
YMMV on if you could get an employer to let you use a different software, but big companies tend to be very protective of IP and are wary of that.
My bachelor degree includes that I spent months practicing Matlab, but actually I only used Octave until two days before the exam.
IMO the benefit of making MATLAB the standard is that it’s tried, tested and can be verified my many other institutions. It is however a dick move for the institute to not provide access to the software they standardise on, even if it’s remotely used.
I agree with that. It’s much easier streamlining software choice rather than letting people choose their own alternatives, since it’s a mess to integrate workflows and all that.
My issue is that we’re basically forced to pirate for an introductory course, where I actually don’t even think it’s necessary to use MATLAB. You can use GNU Octave or even Python. It’s quite frustrating.
I had a physics class that required Mathmatica and a stupid expensive textbook. The professor said the college forced him to use those because the college gets a kickback for it. Luckily he was awesome and told everyone that we could buy the much cheaper older version of the book and pirate the software.
I graduated from my STEM Course on Feb this year. In my 4.5-year course there are total of 5 classes in which we must use MATLAB. But all of my professors agreed to let student use alternative, such as Octave and Python. I remembered vividly one of my classmate who got highest scores somehow use Python and draw a chart that’s even more beautiful and easy to read than most of MATLAB users.
4 of my professors encouraged us just pirate MATLAB. One even gave us his pirate version that he saved in Google Drive.
So it can be done, simple as that.
I had a let’s say introductory course on computational methods for biotech and while matlab was mentioned they taught us python instead and they had us use free software (Thonny)
I’ve just discovered Thonny! I’m not sure of the exact advantages over just vanilla Python though. Maybe because it’s an IDE.
That, it’s just very easy to use
