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Originally Posted by daemonfowl
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No they are not! FreeMat replicates about 70% (percentage is made up not scientific) of the core MATLAB numerical system environment. However bare in mind that most useful MATLAB functions are sold separately as "toolboxes". GNU Octave language is not even 100% compatible with MATLAB language. Scilab is even less compatible with MATLAB than GNU Octave. So no. There is no free alternative for MATLAB numerical computing environment. If somebody is just trying to learn little bit language FreeMat would be the best choice.
There is a reason MathWorks can charge people tens of thousands of dollars for their product. If it was so easy to reproduce open source don't you think that MATLAB would not be that expensive.
As somebody who is using MATLAB in my day job I can attest that is becoming increasingly painful to use MATLAB even on Linux. BSDs (all of them) are more or less useless for scientific computing (lack of proprietary compilers, drivers, applications I can go on and on). The 800 pound Gorilla in the room is RedHat.
FreeMat OpenBSD port is 4.0 current release is 4.2 and it is unlikely to be update due to the lack of interest and problems with JIT compiler. More worrisome for me personally
is that numpy and scipy have not being updated for 3 years which means that even people who use open source tools to do prototyping have no business using OpenBSD.
Unfortunately all of above comes from the mouth of hard core OpenBSD user and the person who actually used/uses OpenBSD for scientific computing at least on my personal laptop.
P.S. Linux emulation layer is useless and as the recent example with Opera essentially self terminating demonstrates developer's time is better spent doing things OpenBSD way than maintaining Linux emulation just
to run one stupid application.
@looop
It is actually a very good idea as long as you do not need a genuine scientific computing. TeXLive works like a charm on OpenBSD (hopefully 2013 will be in ports soon). gcc version is newer than on RedHat and works like a charm. Similarly binutils, gdb (one from ports egdb). Python unfortunately is becoming useless due to numpy and scipy problems. OpenBSD as a network appliance is second to none when it comes to any network related tasks. Full soft raid drivers is a gem. The Achilles Tendon of OpenBSD is a luck of modern file system (read Hammer).