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Comment by yonz | Hacker News Reader

I used Octave when my educational license for Matlab expired. We need OSS competitors to keep Matlab in check, already at $1k/year https://www.mathworks.com/pricing-licensing.html

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They have a home license for €120 and an academic license for €500 though. Of course, Octave is still cheaper.

Octave is a great project though since it is Free (in both senses of the word) it would be nice if people who end up saving €120/year on ML could consider passing a portion of those savings on in the form of a donation.

Yes, the fact that Octave is FOSS is definitely awesome too, I didn’t mean to diminish that :)

Yeah the home MATLAB license is the most expensive software I've actually bought. Octave is... okish. But Matlab is like 80% plotting and Octave's plotting support is pretty terrible.

In my opinion there isn't really anything that competes with MATLAB for the things it is really good at. Numpy is shit.

If you really can't afford £120 for MATLAB then I would say the next best option is Scilab.

Now we just need SOLIDWORKS to introduce a decent hobby license. They added one recently but it's subscription only so screw that.

> Yeah the home MATLAB license is the most expensive software I've actually bought.

Are you sure? The standalone version of Microsoft Office is more expensive at €150.

Windows is even more expensive, but of course most people get that bundled with their computer.

I've never bought Office. Google's office apps are sufficient for my casual use.

> Octave's plotting support is pretty terrible.

Wait, what?

I switched all my plotting in my thesis (5 years ago) from matlab to octave precisely because matlab plots were terrible.

Are you thinking of octave v3 from 15 years ago when it relied on gnuplot by any chance?

FYI the 500 academic license is for institutions. You can buy a student license for yourself for less than that.

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