A number of years ago I knew a postdoc who bought a student copy of Mathematica at the university bookstore so he could use it as part of a short-term collaboration without dropping a non-trivial chunk of his grants on a full license. Shortly after he installed it, the department chair got a personal email from Stephen Wolfram asking what someone who wasn't a graduate student was doing with a student license.

This supported the upward trend of interest in open source and especially ipython around the labs.