FREE/OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE: A STUDY OF SOME APPLICATIONS FOR SCIENTIFIC DATA ANALYSIS OF NUCLEAR EXPERIMENTS
Mário O. de Menezes · 2005
Free/Open Source (FOSS) has been used in science long before the formal social movement known as Free Software/Open Source Software came in to existence. After the Personal Computer (PC) boom in the 80s, commercial closed source software became widely available to scientists for data analysis in this platform. In this paper, we study some high quality FOSS, available also for free, that can be used for complex data analysis tasks. We show the results and data analysis process, aiming to expose the high quality and highly productive ways of both results and processes, while highlighting the different approach used in some of the FOSS. We show that scientists have today in FOSS a viable, high quality alternative to commercial closed source software which, besides being ready to use, also offer the possibility of great customization or extension to fit very particular needs of many fields of scientific data analysis. Among the FOSS, we study in this paper GNU Octave and SCILAB - free alternatives to MATLAB®; Gnuplot free alternative to ORIGIN®-like softwares. We also show that scientists have invaluable resources in modern FOSS programming languages such as Python, and Perl, that can be used both to do data analysis and manipulation, allowing very complex tasks to be done automatically after some few lines of easy programming.