> For students/professors, Mathematica is basically already free at most major universities. When I was still in academia I avoided close source because I want

> For students/professors, Mathematica is basically already free at most major universities. When I was still in academia I avoided close source because I want my research to be accessible. It does make a difference if you need to go through some strange license portal to activate your university license or if you can just install it in one line. For me that meant that my scripts run in octave as good as in matlab, if this was feasible (and of course many packages exist only for matlab).