content: I have to second that. I think the half the sci/tech world is on crazy pills, with all this fascination with Matlab & R. These are hacked together programming languages with some libraries. The action seems to be in the libraries, with many people turning out some excellent work making results look pretty or implementing various useful data manipulations. None of these packages seem to be all that well thought out or documented. Just ripoffs of Matlab.  I just reviewed all the open source packages listed in the article (Octave, Save, Scilab), and I thought the web page for Octave looked nice, but it's documentation is seriously lacking. But it's the same problem of hacked together languages gluing together somewhat functional plotting & analysis libraries. I think we should be using real programming languages, like perl PDL, although numPy is by far more popular. At least those are attached to popular languages.  Another package they missed is QTIplot, which is cross-platform & free but not open source, and quite useful as a basic data/plotting/stats tool. It also does much of the data analysis Matlab handles with much less pain. I particularly enjoyed SofaStat which is open source. MagickPlot is cross-platform, free for personal use, and just looks like it works. Gotta pay for professional use, but it's cheap. I'm just about to evaluate Fityk (free for Linux) & Simfit (British software). Maybe I should post my own review of the relevant software?  People tend to put these software tools into rigid categories, but a curve fitting package sometimes does the signal/data analysis you want even though that's not it's major purpose. The real beast in this category of software is Origin: closed source, expensive, but gorgeous plots, great stats & data analysis tools. Decent customer service. I can't figure out why anyone would use MatLab when they can use Origin. They both cost money, but one actually works. I really wish my university could get its act together and get an Origin site license. That way I wouldn't be stuck looking for a cheap analysis POS.