I'm taking a course named Numerical and Computational Methods Based on Mathematica (Or in Chinese: "基于Mathematica的数值计算方法"), but Wolfram Mathematica is a bit expensive for me to afford. On the first lesson of this course, the teacher told us how to crack this software, and asked us to have Mathematica 11.0 installed on our computers by this Wednesday. However, I just don't want to use cracked softwares.
While it is true that software cracking is inappropriate and even illegal, almost everyone around me uses cracked softwares(such as PS, AE...). As far as I know, nobody in the rest of our class refuse to crack and install the software.
So what should I do? Having a talk with my teacher or simply quitting this course?
Follow-up:
Finally, I've decided to quit this course, because I think I can gain the same knowledge by learning Mathics, a free software recommended by some answers below.
Thank you for all the awesome answers!
Follow-up II:
I feel obliged to mention that now everyone can download the Free Wolfram Engine for Developers. From my understanding, the Wolfram Engine implements the Wolfram Language and is the very kernel of Mathematica, so this is basically a free full version of Mathematica, just without the notebook interface.
Answer
While it is true that software cracking is inappropriate and even illegal, almost everyone around me uses cracked software
That is really bad and I know it happens also in my country (Italy). However, I think there is a false dilemma in your question:
So what should I do? Having a talk with my teacher or simply quitting this course?
There are not the only options you have. There is a third one, which is using Mathematica (or the Wolfram Language) legally for free. Although I am a very happy SageMath user, I've been curious to find out what the options for Mathematica are. In the past it was impossible: you either paid for Mathematica or illegally cracked it, but nowadays there are more ways.
I will describe three of them, but bear in mind that some might be slow or have some limitations. Nevertheless, given that your class is called Numerical and Computational Methods Based on Mathematica I think these defects won't impact your learning.
Mathematica is basically a nice GUI for the Wolfram Language. Since January 2016, the Wolfram Cloud has been launched with two free options:
- Wolfram Development Platform
- Wolfram Programming Lab
You can launch the website at wolframcloud.com and you will need a free account which will give you limited deployment capabilities. But these capabilities are only needed if you want to deploy some code as a cloud API, not to perform computations.
Here I am using the Wolfram Cloud to plot a function:
If you happen to own a Raspberry Pi, you actually have the software as part of the Raspbian operating system. On my Linux computer, I can connect to the Raspberry Pi via SSH using the -X switch for GUI applications:
ssh -X pi@raspberrypi.local
Then, I can run Mathematica:
mathematica
Keep in mind that this will be slow, because while you are using the GUI via your computer, the computations are performed on the Raspberry Pi.
Here's a screenshot of a simple command and a Wolfram Alpha query, using the free Raspberry Pi version:
If you need to satisfy these two constraints:
- no Raspberry Pi available
- offline access needed
Then you can emulate an ARM architecture and install Raspbian on it. It is going to be very slow but it can be done. UnixMen.com has a nice tutorial about a recent version of Raspbian (from 2015) that should be enough to get you started.
Finally, I think it's good to underline again the fact that you should really raise your concerns to your teacher and (at the very least) mention that you have to use one of these workarounds because they are not providing you with the needed tools.
Something similar happened to me in a few instances:
In high school a teacher wanted to give me a pirated copy of LabView. I refused, telling him "I do not use pirated software. Besides, this is a Windows program so I cannot run it".
Of course this was pretty easy because it was high school, so there were no classes to choose or to drop and I had to attend the lectures. Moreover it was just a suggestion to "study better" and it was not really required that students used the software at home.
During my MSc, we were required to use Matlab for assignments but the university won't provide licenses for personal machines, only for lab machines. I was living a bit far from the university, thus I discussed about this with the teacher and got to use Octave instead.
I made sure my code was Matlab compatible except for once when I used a shorthand operator not available in Matlab (it was
a += b). Since I spoke with my professor beforehand, he was keen enough to correct the typo for me and grade the assignment. Basically, talking can help you solve a lot of things.
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