Matlab Is Losing

Open source rivals commercial products in terms of quality which should not be too surprising. This increasing quality has to with the unstoppable spread of knowledge – when 10 people know about something you can package this knowledge make a commercial product, and sell it. But when a thousand, or ten thousand, ot thousands and thousands of people know something, one of them is bound to make it public and release it and attract contributers who are part of the growing number of people with knowledge. The rest is pure self interest, on the part of the users/coders. When quality is comparable, I will use open source because I can take it with me if I move to another job, another project. In a fast-paced economy where careers are more important then loyalty, this is the approach that is going to win, especially for infrastructural stuff.