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What Does the Future Hold for GNU Octave?
nicsterrr asks: "Since returning to education and discovering the delights of signal processing and numerical computation, I have become increasingly unhappy with Matlab. Mathworks refuse to release the Linux student version of Matlab in Europe (their official reason is that apparently us Europeans would pirate it frantically if they did), and hence I have had to run the windows version with Wine (with moderate success). I (and many others) would love to use Octave as our primary numerical computation package, but it is limited in areas such as signal processing, control systems, and especially graphical functions. Their homepage does not give much insight into Octave's current development and likely future. How many people are involved in Octave, or would like to be? Am I one of many that feel a new, concerted effort should be taken to transform Octave into a complete replacement for Matlab? This is a critical piece of open source software for universities and the lack of a Matlab replacement is one of the reasons my department frowns on our requests for Linux based PCs."
A small number of us been using Octave as a Matlab replacement on our Linux and Windows (Cygwin) machines for some time now (and secretly saving our company $$$) doing some signal/image processing numerical work. It functions remarkably well as a Matlab replacement (a few quirks here and there). Since it is free software, it is a compelling alternative to the $$$ we have to pay for extra modules for Matlab.
Remember, since the source code is available, it is easy to add stuff that you need.
I understand the need for some amount of prepackaged goodies that Matlab comes with, but doesn't Octave allow for you to build all the functionality of Simulink and such into it without too much pain.
Octave is a good package, I used it on the DEC alphas back in the day when I couldn't get a version of Matlab. We were running Linux on the Alphas to save money. I know its ridiculous to buy a $5k machine and then save money on the OS, but hey that's academia. The plotting was a little clunky but GNUplot is a fine program.
Come on! You're a university, right? Make the kids write some numerical simulation code. Its *good* for them. I know I hated doing it when I was in college, but it is good knowing that you don't need to be reliant on powerful proprietary software to be a good engineer. That software does tend to make things go faster ofcourse.