Maple on Fedora

[David Liguori]

D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> | From: Hiisi <very-cool at rambler.ru>
>
> | Maple is not open source (free). It was main argument for me to choose another
> | symbolic arithmetic program - maxima ( maxima.sourceforge.net ). It's
> | brilliant.
>
> My daughter bought Mathmatica for a project perhaps five years ago.
> She ran it on RHL9 or something like it.  Anyway, she would have to
> relicence it to move it to a newer distro release or machine so she still
> runs it on the same ancient machine.
>
> If she had bought it for Windows XP, it would have had a much longer
> lifetime.
>
> Lesson: proprietary licensing models work even worse on open platforms
> because open platform have a tradition of binary obsolescence.
>
> Perhaps Maplesoft has a better upgrade model than Wolfram.
>
> The only symbolic algebra package I ever bought was muMATH for the
> z80: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuMATH
> I never got it to work due to its kind of copy protection.  There's
> a theme here.
>
> PARI/GP worked well for my modest needs but it would not work for
> yours.
>
>   
This has been my experience as well.  Maple and Matlab both ostensibly 
can be installed on Linux but in practice it's difficult or impossible.  
I tried years ago, gave up and run them both in Windows.  Open source 
substitutes sometimes do what I need and sometimes not.  If I have time 
I play with them.  In principle I like Linux and open source, but am by 
no means ideological about it.