| Re: Inexpensive / free-ware similar to IDL? [message #17311 is a reply to message #17210] |
Mon, 27 September 1999 00:00   |
Chris Schmidt
Messages: 2
Registered: September 1999
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Junior Member |
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> "K. S. Balasubramaniam" wrote:
>> IDL has been a wonderful tool and has enormous strengths, but individuals
>> cannot afford it.
Liam Gumley wrote:
> If you're already familiar with IDL, is the cost of a single-user IDL
> license for Windows more or less than the cost of your salary and
> benefits for however many weeks it takes for you to find, learn, and do
> something productive with a 'free' package?
<climbs onto soapbox>
A part of the price issue that seems to be forgotten is how pricing affects the
availability of IDL to students, both graduate and undergraduate. RSI
encourages universitiy departments to use IDL by offering discounts for license
packages and site licenses. This has happened at both my undergraduate and
graduate institutions. In my undergraduate physics program, IDL was
indispensible because of the variety of locally written an vendor provided
routines. We did things in our homework assignments that we couldn't dream of
doing otherwise. We were lucky, however, that there were so few of us, and thus
we almost always had access to machines with IDL. However, as dorm PCs (not
owned by the university) have become more prevalent and powerful, the option of
students having individual copies of IDL has become much more popular. The
*idea* is popular, but the price makes it impossible. In the graduate level
world, an increasing number of students have their own PCs at home, and again
the same problem arises.
Yes, there is a "student version" of IDL. We helped Beta test it at Lawrence
University back in 1996 or 1997. Even back then we knew that the array
limitations (65,536 bytes of memory/array, not to mention the other limitations)
would make it almost difficult or impossible to use the student version for most
assignments in even the sophomore level physics courses. We informed RSI of
this at the time.
It would be a great convienence to have a full version of IDL available to
students (to run on their own machines, not university owned) at reasonable
prices (say, sub $300, for example). It is true that in most cases, students
who use IDL have access to the full version through a site-license or group of
licenses. However, I think it hurts the perception of IDL and also hurts the
spread of IDL that there is not a full version that they can afford to run on
their own machines. I know RSI is not a very large company, and I know that
they work very hard to put out their products. I am also aware of their
concerns that academic pricing could be abused (for example, used in a lab when
a site license would be the correct option). I firmly believe, however, that
their user-base, and hence revenues, would grow strongly and steadily with
increased availability of the full version to students, and as a consequence the
prices for the individual, non-academic licence could come down as that larger,
young user-base leaves academia for the "real-world" and wishes to continue use
of IDL.
<gets off of his well-worn soap-box>
regards,
Chris Schmidt
Research Assistant, CIMSS/SSEC/UW-Madison "Team Ozone"
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