Re: How does Octave shine?

[Tom Holroyd]

One of the things that I have been doing with Octave is running 
it on the large cluster we have. I routinely run Octave 
simultaneously on 128 CPUs. Mathworks has given us a deal where 
we could get a license to do that for $36,000. We currently pay 
$96,000 for 11 licenses! It's like airplane tickets. But to date 
nobody is interested in buying the cluster license even though 
it's supposed to be cheaper (and it's out of my control anyway). 
There are alternatives, such as the compiler license or the 
distributed toolbox (both of which cost mucho bucks), but I can 
do development with Octave on my laptop (which I would need a 
separate licence for) for free, and run it on as many CPUs as I 
like.

Furthermore, beyond just being free, if you've ever been 
prevented from running Matlab by a misconfigured license manager, 
despite having paid for a license, you'll know what a royal 
fcking pain it is to fix it. A program whose sole purpose is to 
prevent you from using software is just evil.

Not to mention the excellent support that Octave has. Just as an 
example, I found a bug last week (not a bug per se but rather an 
incompatibility related to a lack of functionality), and it was 
fixed three days later. This is quite typical and I can give 
examples of 1 day turnaround-time on bugs (the longest I've had 
to wait was a couple months or so). Just forget about similar 
times from Mathworks.

Beyond that, there have been times when I needed something 
specialized, and I was able to write it myself in short order 
owing to the availablity of the source code (not always the best 
documentation, but certainly the last word, and more importantly 
I was able to copy some existing code and modify it for my 
purposes).

Tom Holroyd, Ph.D.
We experience the world not as it is, but as we expect it to be.