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A comment on GNU Octave. Parent comment

Re:GNU Octave by Avshalom on Saturday November 19, 2016 @03:12PM (#12995354)
...eh. I mean Mathworks might not be thaaat diligent but "For personal use only. Not for government, academic, research, commercial, or other organizational use"

Like I mean what the hell does that leave for "personal use"?

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Re:GNU Octave by CamperBob2 on Saturday November 19, 2016 @03:33PM (#12995460)
I think it's more of a "Here, now you don't have to warez our stuff" kind of license.

Technically the intent was for self-directed personal education. But the real reason is to encourage people to learn Matlab, and not Numpy or R or something else, and to discourage people from messing around with Octave. It's a classic move for a company that's getting worried about their market share.

Given that most of the value of Matlab over Octave lies in its toolboxes -- which are now $45 each -- this strategy seems sound. A few packages still aren't available, such as the toolbox that does HDL code generation, but those aren't available in the FOSS world either.

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