>Engineering and economics thrive in the Matlab world, especially in academia. It's a fairly good setup for them.

This is precisely what I'm concerned about. R is open source and used in production in various high profile places around the world. Matlab has the same (or lesser?) expressive power and is very expensive.

Why is Matlab (or its derivative Octave - often sold as "if you dont have Matlab...") used in academia at all ?