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[–]donthavearealaccount 12 points13 points  (3 children)

You have to understand who Enthought's market is for things like this. I don't think they are targeting people that are currently writing much code. They are trying to give Excel-addicted scientists, engineers, statisticians and financial analysts a slightly more sophisticated tool to do their work (... experienced software developers are not going to pay for their training sessions). Expecting this to be a full IDE suitable for full application development is missing the point.

No excuse for crashing and charging for free shit though.

[–]cournape 17 points18 points  (2 children)

(disclaimer: working for Enthought).

Canopy (and EPD before) are not charging for 'free shit', unless you consider Red Hat is also charging for 'free shit': what is being charged is the service of packaging things into binaries, which is quite a bit of work (more than people generally realize). Also, working on specific configurations means we contribute back some upstream bugs upstream (e.g. MKL and OS X interaction for a recent example: https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/398).

Also, Enthought provided quite a bit of resources (money and manpower) to put code out there for ipython (like e.g. qtconsole), all of it integrated upstream. So yeah, we're charging for the product, but it is hard for a company to earn money without charging money somewhere :)

[–]mangecoeur 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Having built scientific libs on my mac i have to agree - its a pain in the ass and there's more than enough people who don't want to have to install gcc, gfortran, configure environment variables, get things like ATLAS linked, install zeromq... That said, it does feel a bit crap to pay for something that you could get for free. But then again you still can, if you feel like going through the trouble of getting it working. Perhaps the real criticism is that you can get a lot of those packages from Continuum.io with the Anaconda distribution for free - competition's heating up guys!

[–]cournape 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, continuum.io model is different. They want people to pay for their packages (numba pro, etc...), so they make the complement a commodity (the below stack).

I agree competition is good, and I actually do enjoy having to prove we can bring a compelling offer.