Why Madagascar

Different people and different organizations act for different reasons. Madagascar can mean a lot of things for a lot of people. Feel free to add below your messages, as text, images or movies, for any category of potential users!

Individuals

Graduate student in small research group

Academic researcher with strong theoretical background

Professional researcher

Project manager

Corporations

Disorganized company

Tightly-run company with managers that never did professional programming

Academic research group or small company

Start-up company

Geophysical services company

Computer hardware company

Geophysical acquisition systems company

Why not another open-source package?

Most of the reasons above apply to any open-source package as well. Madagascar is not the only open-source geophysical package, but it is the only one to provide all the components of a shared research environment as described at the beginning of the Overview. Also, it has an active, diverse community of developers (as opposed to a single owner and a mass of passive users) and its current and future freedom is guaranteed by the GNU General Public License (2 or higher).

Why not rewrite Madagascar in-house?

The Project Cost Calculator on Madagascar's Ohloh metrics page shows the estimated cost for a project of this size. You are getting all this for free!