Why do you need to be rich for gnuplot? Aren't gnu things generally GPL?

Sorry it was a bit tongue in cheek.

On many systems I work with and have to debug, gnuplot won't be already installed (and won't be installable on a system not connected to the Internet) so 'rich' would be 'flush in packages with a full system available'.

Sometimes, even imagemagick isn't there, but rsvg-convert is, you can still do amazing things with just bash+curl+svg...

Apparently gnuplot is unrelated to GNU, and the original developers were making a pun on "newplot." It's license is a bit complicated, which is why most systems don't have it.

Or the IT security guys that expertly hand-picked all your available packages for minimum attack surface removed it (but let imagemagick... after some time you stop asking some questions :-)

My guess is they’re referring the need for lots of compute power to get it to run in a reasonable time, which is expensive