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.

So it can be done, simple as that.

I’ve just discovered Thonny! I’m not sure of the exact advantages over just vanilla Python though. Maybe because it’s an IDE.

It really depends on the course, but I think for general undergrad stuff, Python should be capable for most things.

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.

Yeah, the theft comes from stealing someone’s labour, rather than their products. But it depends on the situation though.

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.

Yeah, then other languages should be allowed as well.

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’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.

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.

I’m not sure how it works in the US but where I’m from, the way lessons are conducted are typically like this:

1. 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
2. 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.
3. 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.

What do you say to people that maintains the POV that it’s theft?

What do you say to people whose position is “you are stealing their work; nothing is free”?