A few years ago, I was doing research work with MatLab and there were tons of licensing issues at the university I was working with. I suggested we abandon MatL

A few years ago, I was doing research work with MatLab and there were tons of licensing issues at the university I was working with. I suggested we abandon MatLab and adopt Octave only to receive responses such as: "It's open source software, which means it's largely unfinished and you can't guarantee that all the math routines are actually doing the right thing." I eventually had to give in because my advisor was getting annoyed (and his grant was paying my rent), but the point is that it's unfortunate that _more_ really intelligent people don't contribute to Octave, verify it's correctness and talk it up. Please don't misconstrue my statement as saying "the people working on Octave aren't really intelligent," but having the support of _lots_ of really intelligent people is the only way that it's going to make any significant impact on the scientific research community.