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The importance of free software to science
Free software plays a critical role in science, both in research and in disseminating it. Aspec [...]
Although there is an implicit philosophical stance here—that reproducibility and openness in science are desirable, for instance—it is simply a fact that a working scientist will use the best tools for the job, even if those might not strictly conform to the laudable goals of the free-software movement. Although LaTeX is beloved for the quality of its typesetting, especially for mathematics, it is less universally admired for the inscrutability of its error messages, the difficulty of customizing its behavior using its arcane macro language, and its ability to occasionally make simple things diabolically difficult. The ability to have one source and automatically create a PDF and a web page, or to produce a Word file for a publication that insists on it without having to touch a "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) abomination, greatly simplifies the life of the writer/scientist.
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