This isn't how I remember it. I remember that prior to the scientific python stack, you had to pay for Matlab or mathmatica licenses. The scientific python stac

This isn't how I remember it. I remember that prior to the scientific python stack, you had to pay for Matlab or mathmatica licenses. The scientific python stack meant that for essentially free, you no longer had to justify licenses at any financial or educational institutions. You could just load up your code and run it against your data. In academia this meant that every student could do their homework on their desktop or laptop (if they were motivated). Even in financial companies, the decision was often made to limit the number of licenses - and in most cases they weren't used to actually run production jobs. Quants had to translate their work to another language with the help of their developers. With the scientific python stack you entered a new world with unlimited seats, you could at least try to run the same experimental/exploratory code with minimal changes in a production environment, etc. So in short it didn't need some tentpole user/customer/exemplar. In almost any situation it was free and it started making money as soon as it was downloaded installed and run.