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Software · Education & science

GNU Octave

GNU Octave is a programming language, available on Windows and Linux: command-line use.

  • Completely free
  • Windows and Linux
  • Open source
  • No account

Overview

GNU Octave is a programming language, available on Windows and Linux.

Features described in its Flathub listing and in its Winget manifest: command-line use.

Overview written by LicitPro from the documentation published by the authors and the cited sources; we have not tried the resource ourselves.

Excerpts that establish this information
  • “GNU Octave is a programming language for scientific computing.” — official website, 10 November 2026
  • “Octave is normally used through its interactive command line interface, but it can also be used to write non-interactive programs.” — Flathub, 10 November 2026

At a glance

GNU Octave is completely free: it is open source software, and every feature is available without paying or subscribing.

Its licence (GPL-3.0+) is a copyleft open source licence: you may use, study, modify and redistribute it, including commercially; modified versions must keep the same licence.

Strengths

  • Open source code
  • No account needed
  • Commercial use allowed

About

GNU Octave is a high-level interpreted language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides capabilities for the numerical solution of linear and nonlinear problems, and for performing other numerical experiments. It also provides extensive graphics capabilities for data visualization and manipulation. Octave is normally used through its interactive command line interface, but it can also be used to write non-interactive programs. The Octave language is quite similar to Matlab so that most programs are easily portable. Octave has extensive tools for solving common numerical linear algebra problems, finding the roots of nonlinear equations, integrating ordinary functions, manipulating polynomials, and integrating ordinary differential and differential-algebraic equations. It is easily extensible and customizable via user-defined functions written in Octave's own language, or using dynamically loaded modules written in C++, C, Fortran, or other languages.

Description from Flathub — AppStream (Flathub)

Sources and checks

  • Facts collected from Winget (Windows Package Manager) (credit card, account, publisher, licence, free status, platforms, commercial use, version) —
  • Facts collected from Official plan pages (pricing, licence, terms) (commercial use) —
  • Facts collected from Flathub (credit card, source code, publisher, licence, free status, platforms, commercial use, version) —
  • Facts collected from Comptoir du Libre (source code, licence) —
  • Last technical check: 6 November 2026
  • Description from Flathub — AppStream (Flathub)

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