[ghaff]

Personally I think it's a great practice to default to FOSS, whether community bits or commercially supported for a variety of reasons. However:

>if the only way of doing science is by using expensive apps only available to rich individuals or companies that are well off, well its quite limiting in who can gain an attractive amount of experience working with it.

The same might be said of all the expensive hardware and other facilities required for many STEM (and even other) courses. Electron microscopes and MRI machines (and exotic computer hardware) are scarce resources however you look at it.

[corty]

Machines are naturally scarce, you need resources and labour to build them for each machine. Software is artificially scarce, the reproduction cost for software is almost zero.

So while it is understandable that hardware will be limiting and that cannot really be helped, software should never be a limiting factor in education imho. One can never remove all obstacles, but the easily avoidable ones should be avoided.

Btw., similar arguments apply to books, there is no reason digital versions of books used in education shouldn't be free (as in beer and freedom).