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?
Our uni basically transitioned to python plus matplotlib at some point. Not because they wanted to get rid of the paid matlab license but because python got quite popular.
I think the students still get the matlab key for free.
It really depends on the course, but I think for general undergrad stuff, Python should be capable for most things.
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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”?
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.
You already pointed out that there is a free alternative, so anyone who says “nothing is free” is a bit mentally challenged.
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.
Umm actually, lots of things are free. Those who did the work got paid a salary anyway.
I graduated with a BS in electrical engineering in May of this year. We used Matlab in multiple courses in the program. We were encouraged to purchase the student version of Matlab. However, all three professors in the program were 100% ok with students using Octave or whatever software you wanted, as long as the work got done.
Your professor sounds like a dick.
It could also be that some admin or department chair was getting some form of kickback for implementing Matlab, and required subordinate department professors to include it in their curriculum/syllabus. Just look at how Pearson shoehorned their garbage software into upper education, to the point where students are required to pay $100+ per class just to complete homework, and it’s no secret that administrators and department chairs receive kickbacks for it.
Even though I’m generally for open-source software, I know that in heavy duty use, highly niche specialisations, and in industries in general it’s difficult to find equally competent software. That’s why I put emphasize on my specific situation, where it’s an introductory course. Heck, we ended up doing what could be done in Python anyway.
I think I know that course coordinator xD
We had pretty much the same experience. The guy was even kinda pissed off when I said the same could be done in Python too without much additional effort. So our whole class also used the “free student version” 🏴☠️
In my opinion it makes a huge difference between pirating for education compared to pirating for commercial use.
As another commentor said, it kinda depends on what is the purpose of the course. If the purpose was to actually teach you the MATLAB ecosystem, then yea, sure, teach it all you want, but the institution has to provide the software.
But for an intro course? The students should probably be able to just use what they want.
In another course (statistics if I remember correctly) by another teacher, we actually had to interpret and write MATLAB code on paper, so it was absolutely necessary to be familiar with it even though it was not the actual topic of the course and it was never mentioned as a necessary tool for the course or whole study. There were only books listed that we had to get beforehand, which is pretty normal. Imo they should at least have listed it there, or provided it to the students.
It’s morally grey, but I would’ve done the same. The important part is learning to code, not the language.
If you’re gonna force the students to use Matlab, you gotta provide them with a license. If the teacher can’t convince the institution to get these licenses, they should provide a free alternative.
Yeah, then other languages should be allowed as well.
This is a case where the class is led by a moron. That person should be reported.
Piracy for the students was justified because they had no other option. But outside of this school, if I were you and I needed the software again, I’d definitely use Octave without question. (Or Python if I’m willing to learn something new.)
The point is, if you have free and open source alternatives, use them. You’ll be better off.
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Lol numpy & scipy is for hobbyist? Clearly you’re not in the industry.
I’m guessing he means in engineering (excluding computational). I’m a chemical engineer, and yes, MATLAB is everywhere, only few know about Octave, and python is used mostly for personal projects, I’ve never seen it in an industrial environment, apart maybe web base user interfaces, but don’t get me started with LabVIEW.
I work in Computational finance. I don’t think I’ve seen Matlab in over a decade. These days it’s 100% Python
Not familiar with MATLAB/Octave myself, but I’ve seen numpy being used on two different professional projects, both of which I was involved with. scipy gets used less often due to its niche nature, but it’s around as well.
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.
No it is not. You should have told the coordinator: fine, provide us the software.
I’m not sure what would have happened had I insisted. I imagine that they’d probably ask us to obtain it on our own though, based on my memory that they were insistent that everybody must have it.
I’m an old geezer, having graduated from college over 30 years ago now… This doesn’t have to do with piracy, but with professors. One advanced course I took covered topics that included AI and chaos theory. It was taught by a visiting professor from another country and she was terrible. It was clear she was just regurgitating what was in out textbooks without trying to really understand it.
One day she was out and we had another professor with an actual background in AI fill in. We learned a lot that one day.
Our college had anonymous evaluations that students would fill out on the last day of a course, and the college really pushed the claim that they were taken seriously. Before the day came to fill these out most of the students in the class got together and formed a plan. We all agreed on how we would fill out the questions. For example, one question asked what we liked best about the course. We all agreed to write something along the lines of “the day the professor was out and the other professor taught instead. We actually learned a lot that day”. We never saw that professor at our college after that year ended, and like to think our evaluations were a big part of the reason. The bottom line is that we provided a united front for our grievances through those anonymous evaluations.
If your college offered similar sorts of course/professor evaluations I would have tried to do the same thing in this case. Get as many members of the class to band together and point out the issues of having to “obtain” MATLAB, and being unwilling to consider free alternatives. If your college doesn’t do these sorts of evaluations then getting multiple students to write complaints to the department head, etc. might be a viable alternative.
This is a good idea. I am a student representative for public student housing and sometimes we have to resort to encourage other residents to do some “mail-bombing” (as in sending a lot of emails not the Teddy K method) to get things done.
We also have tose evaluations, albeit we do not coordinate what to write there, our professors aren’t that bad and when one was it wasn’t necessary for her to get so many bad evaluations she was fired.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
I think Python has killed the main use case of MATLAB already. Schools should not be teaching MATLAB.
Hard disagree. Nothing comes close to MATLAB + Simulink. Nothing is even trying to cover the same usages.
I dunno. GNURadio uses Python and C++ and you can do a lot of the same things
Hopsan shares similarities with Simulink, and can also work together with it.
Will have to check it out. It’s a new name to me.
Piracy is always justified
What do you say to people that maintains the POV that it’s theft?
