Is SciPy killing the Wolfram star?

[KF6GPE]

That's a really interesting plot. It comes at an especially interesting time for me, because just this weekend I was looking at what the licensing schemes for Mathematica (which I used a little in college) and Maple (which I used a lot in college and loved and bought a copy) were. Both now have a hobbyist category, which they didn't last time I looked. I was really looking for a CAS, for some stuff I want to do. Mathematica was always the aspirational purchase for me; something about it being bundled on the NeXT and my father pointing out that if he had that much money, he'd buy my mother a car...

I did end up getting a hobbyist license for Maple. I wasn't totally sure, and then a combination of nostalgia and a very nice sales rep pushed me over the edge...

But back to the plot. I'm not surprised, especially for research computation. I've been at few research places in the last ten years, and everybody's moved from Mathematica or Matlab (mostly Matlab; they were computer vision folks for the most part, and then some machine learning) to Octave, then to SciPy. I don't know what's happening in the universities. I have a niece going to ASU in the fall to start her undergrad studies in physics, and I am very curious to talk with her about her classes this Christmas.