I would just like to share a story, and probably an opinion as well. When I was doing my STEM undergraduate degree a couple of years ago, I took a course in which I had to use MATLAB. I won't disclose too much information, but it was a course involving computation.

Well, we (the students) weren't given a student/institutional license of any sort, but the course coordinator still insisted on using MATLAB. We took it as an implicit instruction to "somehow" obtain MATLAB. In the end, one guy in our class pirated it and distributed it the whole class.

Before that though, I did approach my course coordinator, asking them if it's possible to use other software like GNU Octave, which is a clone of MATLAB. Personally I think it should also possible to use any other programming language like Python for example, since the important part is the computation part, in my opinion. They refused any discussion and did not even consider alternatives, instead basically forcing us to "obtain" MATLAB. How else? Well.

As I have said, we all pirated it in the end.

I did something quite interesting though, which is that for every quiz, assignment, and projects that we had, I'll run the same exact MATLAB code on GNU Octave, to see if it's compatible. And it is. It works flawlessly. There's only one function that GNU Octave didn't support back the (this was a couple of years ago), and even then, it wasn't an essential feature, you could use other software for that function as well.

By the end of that semester, I had compiled almost all input/output of the MATLAB code alongside its GNU Octave's counterpart, to demonstrate that we didn't need to pirate MATLAB to get through this undergraduate course.

Regrettably though, I didn't follow through. So sad!

Do you think piracy is justified in this case?

With lots of things being developed through web technologies, and many things being web-based so that it is cross-platform, will operating systems still be relevant?

We can differ philosophically by using Debian or Arch or Windows or Mac, but if nowadays applications are web-based or developed through something like Electron such that it can run on practically all modern operating systems. what is the relevance of operating systems galore?

Don't get me wrong I love FOSS and Linux and stuff, but it seems that the paradigm right now is creating web applications, with many things being web-based.

Am I off, or is this something you also think about?

P.S. I'm a total noob when it comes to IT, so the question might be weirdly phrased.

Just curious if there's any Malaysians using Lemmy here! I looked at Malaysia communities in Lemmy but they seem to be deserted.

I use vim btw

I use Windows btw