You're forgetting that it may seem like no one put a gun to our heads to use Matlab, if you're in school - you're required to use it. The same goes for MS Office, Visio, and hundreds of other programs. Can you imagine how good Octave, LibreOffice or any other open source application would be, if instead of forcing users to buy proprietary versions of software schools and/or students were required to donate just 1% of the cost of proprietary software to open source alternative?