I'm an Octave fan. I generally prefer it to Matlab, and do my daily scientific computing in Octave. To me, the biggest threat to Octave is SciPy/NumPy. The stud

I'm an Octave fan. I generally prefer it to Matlab, and do my daily scientific computing in Octave. To me, the biggest threat to Octave is SciPy/NumPy. The students I work with all prefer those libraries. I haven't switched largely because of my own custom libraries and because the the Octave syntax is more appropriate for numerical work. One possibility: Find a company that buys a ton of Matlab licences in order to get access to a specific library. Implement that library well, GPLed, for a price that is below their annual license cost. It's a tiny niche (big company, small library), but if it can be found, it is one the Octave team could do well. Everyone, except Mathworks, would win. Proprietary libraries do offer sponsoring companies greater competitive advantage, but the first mover to a cost savings is already a winner. Getting a long list of big Matlab customers is a place to start. Sometimes they boast about the biggest fish in advertisements. If running out of money is a critical problem for Octave development, make finding GPL revenue the core goal. Octave is now complete and capable enough that it can take care of itself for a year with bugfixes alone.