Re: Scientific computing ?
Spoke like an engineer 
Boss in my humble experience only this fist thing I came upon where I have to match the results of commercial in order to verify open source.
There were things I read about like embedded firmware or cad tools, where open source have catching up to do.
Other then that open source rock!! Please be mind full almost all the big company them self sponsoring/starting open source projects.
I mean(the way open source people say) a couple hounder people can not compete with millions of developers.