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Universities in a lot of countries do not have budgets that can deal with even $1000 a seat.

I can confirm this. We have a site-wide license for Matlab, but not for Mathematica. Educational version of Mathematica 7 would cost me my two monthly salaries - therefore I will pirate it.

I didn't buy any, but from my point of view, Mathematica is priced just a bit lower than Matlab.

Matlab quotes me $1900 for a single common license: http://www.mathworks.com/store/loginSubmitGuest.do while Mathematica is $1750: http://store.wolfram.com/view/app/mathematica/

How much does site license for Matlab cost you?

I got Matlab student version 4 years ago for around $140.

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