GNU Octave on Free Software Foundations High Priority List

Posted by Soeren Sonnenburg on October 6, 2008

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) maintains a high priority list of software projects and can be found here.

Quoting the FSF:

The FSF high-priority projects list serves to foster the development of projects that are important for increasing the adoption and use of free software and free software operating systems. [...] Some of the most important projects on our list are replacement projects. These projects are important because they address areas where users are continually being seduced into using non-free software by the lack of an adequate free replacement.

With rank eight among the top ten prioritized software projects is GNU Octave --- a free software Matlab replacement.

As this is very relevant to our community that is strongly dominated by Matlab, I would like to encourage everyone to try out octave 3.0. If you tried octave 2.x or any earlier version at some point, it really matured a lot. It supports all the data types like cell arrays, dense or sparse arrays you know from matlab and yes it has all these plotting functions like plot, surf3d etc too. And if you ever tried to extend matlab using C code, support is really much better from the octave side not to mention the killer feature: Octave is fully supported by swig! Still not convinced? We will have John W. Eaton to introduce octave to us at the NIPS'08 MLOSS Workshop. So what are you waiting for, give octave a try and see how you can help!