I would just like to share a story, and probably an opinion as well. When I was doing my STEM undergraduate degree a couple of years ago, I took a course in which I had to use MATLAB. I won't disclose too much information, but it was a course involving computation.
Well, we (the students) weren't given a student/institutional license of any sort, but the course coordinator still insisted on using MATLAB. We took it as an implicit instruction to "somehow" obtain MATLAB. In the end, one guy in our class pirated it and distributed it the whole class.
Before that though, I did approach my course coordinator, asking them if it's possible to use other software like GNU Octave, which is a clone of MATLAB. Personally I think it should also possible to use any other programming language like Python for example, since the important part is the computation part, in my opinion. They refused any discussion and did not even consider alternatives, instead basically forcing us to "obtain" MATLAB. How else? Well.
As I have said, we all pirated it in the end.
I did something quite interesting though, which is that for every quiz, assignment, and projects that we had, I'll run the same exact MATLAB code on GNU Octave, to see if it's compatible. And it is. It works flawlessly. There's only one function that GNU Octave didn't support back the (this was a couple of years ago), and even then, it wasn't an essential feature, you could use other software for that function as well.
By the end of that semester, I had compiled almost all input/output of the MATLAB code alongside its GNU Octave's counterpart, to demonstrate that we didn't need to pirate MATLAB to get through this undergraduate course.
Regrettably though, I didn't follow through. So sad!
Do you think piracy is justified in this case?
It's probably the main reason why I think most open-source software will never be able to replace their proprietary counterpart: the fact that proprietary software are typically developed for either massive or highly niche industries, and so they are funded and are basically now integrated inside the ecosystem of such industries. As people use it more and more, Mathworks will develop more toolboxes with hardware integration, until it basically becomes the de facto software for that purpose (e.g. computation). I'm all for open-source software, but I don't see a way out of it. Big companies with mega budgets can always improve their software, far outpacing any alternative open-source projects.
I don't use MATLAB nor GNU Octave for my work, but I imagine that the hardware that I'll operate on probably require MATLAB, and so there's no incentive for me to use GNU Octave, especially if it has poor hardware support or lack of toolboxes or whatever such issues. This is a natural consequence of open-source alternatives being built from scratch typically with volunteers. That's insane to me that GNU Octave is still somewhat usable for some basic computational work.