Octave is a clone of MATLAB, which is MathWorks' flagship product. They have identical programming languages and similar libraries. MATLAB's initial release was

Octave is a clone of MATLAB, which is MathWorks' flagship product. They have identical programming languages and similar libraries. MATLAB's initial release was in 1984, and Octave's was in 1988. So there is a direct comparison in terms of product features, target market and development period. A critical difference is that one is closed-source commercial product and the other is an open source GNU project. The huge difference in success makes for an interesting comparison of these two models of software development. It reminds me of an essay by an a16z partner about "Why there will never be another Red Hat" [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-want-to-be-the-next-red-hat/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-wa...