I tried to avoid Amazon and even found a French printers but the mailing costs were too high outside Europe.

One of the reasons why we do it is that we don’t have the same funding lying around. And also a different attitude towards intellectual property and a strong dislike of being effectively hostage of a for-profit software company. At least that’s the feeling around here (not X, but close enough to meet people there for lunch :) ).

It is still more difficult than we’d like to get funded for Open Source development (as a non-CS scientist), but there have been some encouraging noise recently, and some political will to reduce our reliance on black-box commercial software.