Open source science

This is an opinion piece from the American Mathematical Society talking about the use of proprietary software in Mathematics.  The same argument could easily be made for proprietary software in the sciences in general. Interestingly enough one of the authors of the piece is also the man behind SAGE, which I am finally installing on my assigned computer at school today. Its also why I have been using Python with scipy and matplotlib as a replacement for Matlab recently. Its not that I believe I’m any smarter than the kind of people working at wolfram or mathworks (I’m not) but I like knowing that the algorithms I use are open to be reviewed by anyone with the skill and the time. Plus I’d prefer not to have all my work in a format I can’t use without pirating software or paying per-seat licensing.