@niconiconi >BTW, many years ago I remember reading an article on either fsf, gnu, or stallman.org, and near the end, it says "the only acceptable use of proprietary software is for the purpose of reverse engineering and getting rid of it."
I can't find the articles at the moment, but it is indeed noted that the only time you should ever use proprietary software is to get rid of it.

>I was using Matlab exactly because I was trying to understand the behavior of its proprietary implementation of an algorithm.
If you really intend to replace such proprietary thing, great, carry on.

I made the assumption that someone undertaking difficult reverse engineering wouldn't refer to the proprietary thing as "Great" - what I read is that you were using the software because it was convenient to do so (once, but still) and I didn't see anything about reverse engineering.