[GFK_of_xmaspast]

20 years ago when I was in grad school I did use octave to do my research, and it was 'mostly fine'. (Also I discovered that a couple of the matlab toolboxes I needed were just .m files and there was no technical reason that I couldn't just copy them into a local directory for octave to find; I consider this no worse than 'morally iffy' considering that we had a matlab site license)