The unexpected effectiveness of Python in science

The unexpected effectiveness of Python in science

That's great but often (a) even the academic licenses cost their users non-trivial amounts of money, and (b) you don't necessarily get to keep your academic licenses after you graduate and/or move to another institution. Especially if you start working for a commercial company in your field of research you will require a full license for the software, which your company will need to pay for and which they probably would prefer not to. (The whole point of cheap academic licenses is to make people dependent on the software in question so they, or someone, will eventually have to pay up when they start using the software “for real”.)

Software that (like Python and its extensions for scientific computing) is free as in beer/speech from the get-go is preferable in this context.