It's worth noting that there already are many open-source research packages. My graduate and postdoc work was using magnetoencephalography in neuroscience, and

It's worth noting that there already are many open-source research packages. My graduate and postdoc work was using magnetoencephalography in neuroscience, and the majority of the packages are open source. The authors were happy to welcome bug reports and source code contributions, and any code used for an analysis can be easily re-used. By way of example, my postdoc work was all completed using FieldTrip (http://fieldtrip.fcdonders.nl/ http://fieldtrip.fcdonders.nl/), free for both MATLAB or Octave. All the source code is on Github (https://github.com/eykanal/EEGexperiment https://github.com/eykanal/EEGexperiment), and anyone could reproduce the majority of my analysis on their dataset.