Open Source - is like sharing a recipe!

Of all the open source analogies, the one that I enjoy the most, partly maybe because I love cooking is,

"Open source is like sharing a recipe."

A recipe that is shared for free and we can alter the recipe to make it our own. That is an interesting thought, isn't it? 

If we think more about it, I feel open source taps our creative energy. We can receive hints from various recipes and make our own recipe. We can then savor and relish the dish and share the recipe with our friends. That is the distinctiveness of an open source package. Deceased are the days when we go look for the best software which offers all the features that we need, only to discover that it is expensive.  In the end, we compromise over a free version with less features. With an open source package, you can select the features you demand, customize it to meet your needs and distribute it with the community. 

These are two wonderful open source softwares for mathematical computations I came across recently.

1. Octave - the best alternative for MatLab. It is mostly intended for numerical computations. This software was a savior for us for a machine learning class project which needed MatLab. It provides extended features for information visualization and has a great deal of graphical capabilities. Vector calculations and matrix calculations are fast. There is usually a talk that open source software does not have good documentation, but octave documentation gives you what you need and is very helpful. 

2. Sage (Open Source Mathematics Software) - When Wolfram Alpha gives up factorizing a 72 digit number, this software does it in seconds. Wolfram Alpha allocates limited computing power for each mathematical operation that is being executed and gives up after a limited amount of time. Whereas, Sage completes complicated computations within seconds. It gives you a separate worksheet to work with and the worksheet can be saved for later use. If octave is already installed in our system, we can use Octave from Sage by calling the octave command within Sage. This combination is the best for numerical computations. An example for using Octave within Sage is as follows.

sage: octave.eval('2+2')
'ans = 4'

And, a recent find was,

3. Borg Disassembler - Borg Disassembler is an excellent open source free dis-assembler for Win 32 PE files and is definitely capable of competing with OllyDbg and IDA Pro. OllyDbg is a shareware and IDA Pro has very limited features for free. Borg Disassembler is a free, open source software and has necessary features for dis-assembly and reverse engineering.

Open source is the best thing that happened to developers. A developer instead of relying on buying software can build wonderful things on open source. Having stated all that, in that respect are always secret recipes in the market that will not be revealed whatsoever. Dishes made out of secret recipes like Windows definitely costs money for all its worth. For people who love ready-made, it either costs money or the wait for the software to exist. For people who like customized things, open source is that is.