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."