What Does the Future Hold for GNU Octave?

nicsterrr asks: "Since returning to education and discovering the delights of signal processing and numerical computation, I have become increasingly unhappy with Matlab. Mathworks refuse to release the Linux student version of Matlab in Europe (their official reason is that apparently us Europeans would pirate it frantically if they did), and hence I have had to run the windows version with Wine (with moderate success). I (and many others) would love to use Octave as our primary numerical computation package, but it is limited in areas such as signal processing, control systems, and especially graphical functions. Their homepage does not give much insight into Octave's current development and likely future. How many people are involved in Octave, or would like to be? Am I one of many that feel a new, concerted effort should be taken to transform Octave into a complete replacement for Matlab? This is a critical piece of open source software for universities and the lack of a Matlab replacement is one of the reasons my department frowns on our requests for Linux based PCs."

Octave == Near Matlab Replacement

[Anonymous Coward]

A small number of us been using Octave as a Matlab replacement on our Linux and Windows (Cygwin) machines for some time now (and secretly saving our company $$$) doing some signal/image processing numerical work. It functions remarkably well as a Matlab replacement (a few quirks here and there). Since it is free software, it is a compelling alternative to the $$$ we have to pay for extra modules for Matlab.

Remember, since the source code is available, it is easy to add stuff that you need.

get octave-forge (matcompat)

[kilrogg]

Make sure to check out Paul Kienzle's Octave-forge [link to tarball] [sf.net] (formerly named "signalPAK", then "octavePAK", then "matcompat"). It adds alot of matlab compatible .m files, his web page is here [powernet.co.uk] but doesn't seem to be updated to mention the new octave-forge package.

Re:get octave-forge (matcompat)

[jonniesmokes]

I understand the need for some amount of prepackaged goodies that Matlab comes with, but doesn't Octave allow for you to build all the functionality of Simulink and such into it without too much pain.

Octave is a good package, I used it on the DEC alphas back in the day when I couldn't get a version of Matlab. We were running Linux on the Alphas to save money. I know its ridiculous to buy a $5k machine and then save money on the OS, but hey that's academia. The plotting was a little clunky but GNUplot is a fine program.

Come on! You're a university, right? Make the kids write some numerical simulation code. Its *good* for them. I know I hated doing it when I was in college, but it is good knowing that you don't need to be reliant on powerful proprietary software to be a good engineer. That software does tend to make things go faster ofcourse.

Re:get octave-forge (matcompat)

[nicsterrr]

Indeed we are a university.. Unfortunately, the more forward thinking of us are battling against short sighted lecturers (the majority) who think open source is for 'enthusiasts' only, and students who don't give a f*** about anything as long as they can access their hotmail accounts. Our university has just signed up to a campus agreement with MS and suddenly everybody is running win2k, IIs, outlook etc. (outlook and IIS at this point in time are really stupid considering all the viruses that have been around recently; many of our machines have recently been infected). We seem to be progressing backwards. I have been trying to organise some lectures on open source philosophy for relevant staff, but faced with all this I sometimes just feel like walking away. This seems to be a big problem in English Universities.. Academics seem to have lost their way somewhere, and now fail to understand that the open source model parallels their own sacred open peer-review research.

other alternatives

[JDisk]

You might want to have a look at other alternatives such as Scilab [inria.fr]. Other free mathematical programs [freeservers.com] also exist, but scilab and octave seem to be the closest in spirit (and language) to matlab.

Something Doesn't Make Sense

[mwr]

The department's frowning on Linux-based PCs because you can't get the student edition of Matlab in Europe?

Your department shouldn't be installing student edition on any institutional PCs anyway. Student edition is for students' personal machines.

Also, this link [mathworks.com] says "Release 12 of MATLAB Student Version, including MATLAB 6 and Simulink 4, is now available to students worldwide." Maybe that's not including the Linux version.

So, suffice to say I'm confused. Mathworks will sell your school all the non-student-edition copies it wants for any platform, regardless of whether you're in the US. So where's the problem?

Re:Something Doesn't Make Sense

[nicsterrr]

Maybe the meaning was lost in my hurried translation there.. the two subjects are kind of separate: The refusal of Mathworks to sell the Linux Student version is one of the reasons we (students) are unhappy. The lack of an open source Matlab replacement in the department is a philosophical issue with regard to where our university (and others) should be looking to go in the future with regard to I.T (i.e. open source to reflect the nature of academic research, or continue with the current situation where our university is slowly becoming a MS only network).

Octave: Help Wanted

[Anonymous Coward]

It says right here [octave.org] that they want people to help add features to the software.

The page contains links to a wish-list of features they'd like added, as well as links to their mailing list and it's archives. No point in asking the same questions over again.

I could be wrong, but I think this is the page you're looking for...