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.