[dagw]

I've tried this many times in my career and it unfortunately almost never works out of the box for me for anything but the most trivial examples. Either they're using some library or toolbox that Octave doesn't have, or they've used it in a way that isn't 100% compatible with Octave.

[wakeupcall]

I can believe this, the status of the various libraries/toolboxes is not all made equal so YMMV depending on the field.

We had a few cases where this was the case involving the signal processing toolbox for example and couldn't reproduce the same results. In such cases we just refused to participate in the consortium.

In my old field we were mostly using R. If there's no active use of matlab, it doesn't make any sense to license it for a single collaboration. By the time you need it again, the license would be expired. And this completely ignores the "how do you want to run it", which for us involved a linux-only cluster. It's literally trashing money and time.

Commercially-licensed software is a true pain for research and collaboration, it doesn't matter if it's any good or not.

[7thaccount]

Commercial software is indeed a pain unless your entire organization uses it. If you're the one person in your organization that needs commercial software "X" it can be very annoying. First of all it's a major pain for the purchasing team, then your IT folks or yourself have to get it to run and there seems to always be some library or DLL missing or something.