[PD] Is open source better?

[Simon Wise]

On 10/02/14 13:36, Pall Thayer wrote:
> This is where things enter into the odd world of academia. In all honesty,
> I think our application for the particular grant that was available was an
> "outlier". The grant came with caveats. Projects were to target technology
> that would likely be used by faculty and students and the resulting work
> (publications or, in our case, software) would be released under open
> licenses. As far as I could tell, ours was the only project that was
> producing actual software. We were able to pay the Apple Dev fee for one
> year from our funds but our application wasn't ready for distribution
> within that time so we never submitted it to the app store and have
> released the source code instead. We were never big fans of distributing it
> through the app store anyway.

Well I guess the target platform is jail-broken Apples then.

Re academia ... I spent the last few years studying in an Australian university, 
maths and computing ... the students were a reasonable mix of linux, mac and 
windows users, not sure about the android/iOS split, while the staff and 
teaching had a somewhat stronger emphasis on linux and open source than the 
students. Matlab was the main exception to this.

As a target platform android certainly has a much bigger user base worldwide 
than jail-broken iOS, though the apples may be much better for some audio uses.


Simon