On Fri, 27 Aug 2010, Robert Nesius wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 27 Aug 2010, Adam Morris wrote:
>>
>>> I've also used proprietary products that I'm still desparately 
>>> searching for a good FOSS replacement for, but that is another 
>>> discussion altogether.
>>
>> I know about that.  Right now I don't use Mathematica, or have much of 
>> a need for it, but I don't think anything out there can do what 
>> Mathematica does, not at that level, so I could still see myself using 
>> it or recommending it to my son, but I would proceed cautiously, always 
>> trying to use free software to do the same work whenever the free 
>> software could do it.
>
> There are FOSS software suites out there that aim squarely at 
> Mathematica. (Octave?  Sage perhaps?)  I think Mathematica is still the 
> BSD of math packages though.  And the B in BSD stands for Big, not 
> Berkeley.  See "Liar's Poker". (The Book).


Octave's target is MATLAB -- they aim to be able to run any MATLAB code in 
Octave, unchanged.  They may not quite achieve it, but close.  They also 
add useful features to Octave that are not found in MATLAB.  I think of 
the functionality of Octave as being more like the functionality of R than 
like Mathematica.

I wasn't familiar with Sage.  Thanks.  How well-developed is it?

One I would have named is Maxima:

http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

I've used it, it works.  It's no Mathematica.  But, like I said, I'll use 
programs like Maxima unless I really need the additional power I'd get 
from Mathematica.  I'm not going to make a habit out of using Mathematica 
and I don't use it at all now.  Funny thing -- I had a copy that I bought 
in 1995 and I threw it in the trash a week or two ago.  It ran on Win 3.1.

Mike