Matlab licensing is prohibitive for everyone in a team to have one and WAN licences are 4x the cost of a seat, so we tend to have code capable of running in both octave and matlab in general. The model is all users can use octave for lower level / common code components and it works finw, and then the system level guys who really require matlab for its toolboxes can also use them and that common code also. If it was not for the advanced matlab toolboxes (and some key engineers who know only matlab) we'd probably have moved to python or Julia.l to get away from this two tier use model