&gt;What &quot;vastly superior&quot; FOSS solutions do you have in mind?<p>Depends on the problem domain. A good example is 1D numerical perturbation theory; my colleagues struggle to beat mathematica over the head until it gives them roughly what they want. On the other hand, it&#x27;s much easier using jupyter, numpy, and matplotlib.<p>&gt;Do you think these aren&#x27;t going to have errors in them?<p>Of course they do, but they won&#x27;t go unfixed for years on end. You can also figure out what&#x27;s wrong without having to reverse engineer a big binary blob.