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[edit]
Graduate student in small research group[edit]
Academic researcher with strong theoretical background[edit]
Professional researcher[edit]
Project manager[edit]
Corporations[edit]
Disorganized company[edit]
Tightly-run company with managers that never did professional programming[edit]
Academic research group or small company[edit]
Start-up company[edit]
Geophysical services company[edit]
Computer hardware company[edit]
Geophysical acquisition systems company[edit]
Why not another open-source package?[edit]
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?[edit]
The Project Cost Calculator on Madagascar's Open Hub (formerly Ohloh) metrics page shows the estimated cost for a project of this size. You are getting all this for free!