MATLAB vs Octave

MATLAB is much faster and the built in IDE is the greatest IDE ever created and the only one worth using.

On the other hand, Octave's has some syntax extensions that really make it look nicer.

I can't decide.

The wide scope of features means that GCC won't produce optimal code compared to a focused compiler to a limited platform like Microsoft's compilers.

The reason for this is that it's easy to write a half-assed compiler that kind-of works on your platform in your spare time, but it takes a lot of skill and dedication to make a truly great compiler that works very well on a popular platform like Visual C++.  You need someone to foot the bill in order to do great work.  You either get your money from a University or from a commercial software company.  When the money comes from a University, you may get some interesting ideas implemented, but there is no feedback from a market to indicate how useful the software is.  So school funded free software ends up being a muddled mess that is of little use to most people.  You need to get a commercial company involved to shape that into something people might want to use.

The only environment where there is any chance that you are forced to dedicate yourself to make something good that people want to use, and is not just a bunch of technological masturbation, is in a commercial software company.  This isn't true for all software companies.  Only that, in the few places they exist, they are always inside a software company.

They may be better organized in general, but they don't have greater motivation or perform better (write maintainable and readable code that achieves the specs within a given time frame).

So either the economic and social lessons demonstrated by the 20th century are wrong: wealth doesn't motivate people to better themselves; the USSR was a communist heaven that did not crumble into economic ruin.  Or there is a tiny, but very obnoxiously loud, group of freetards on the internet hyping the stupid shit they work on in their spare time.  A group of people trying to boost their over-inflated egos with the software they like to use.

>>29
Why would ethical issues that determine how a program is licensed have any significant effect on the quality of the code that is written?
These issues do not determine the quality of the code. I never claimed this.

The skill of the people writing the software, and their dedication to it, I would think, are much larger factors.
Indeed. But how does one go about getting skilled and dedicated programmers? In an open source project, your ability to bring in talent is crippled. You can only hope that the project you are working on is so admirable that it makes people want to work on it very hard for free.

These issues can be solved by selling your software. If you are working for a company that makes money by selling software, they can offer you incentive to work on their code. This company can also decide to only hire the best of programmers. Unlike open source projects, who take pretty much whoever they can, companies make sure to have some sort of standards.

And onto the dedication. While someone who is dedicated to an open source project may put in a couple hours a day at most into the project, at a software company, you are obligated to work for at least 8 hours on the code.

Propriety software is a better model for good software.