[skedaddle]

Octave is wonderful. It's one of those free software projects whose success and necessity inspire the entire movement.

In one of my first jobs I saved a bunch of money for the company just by porting stuff out of Matlab. It wasn't just that the licenses were pricey, it's that they were a pain in the butt, plus the program was slow and very difficult to orchestrate. At least at the time.

It wasn't always easy or possible to replace a client's Matlab analyses with an Octave script, but we at least confined it to just one license on one server, stashed inside a utility closet. While meanwhile all other data analysis work flows had been automated and moved into EC2, where they ran for free on Octave.