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?
I graduated with a BS in electrical engineering in May of this year. We used Matlab in multiple courses in the program. We were encouraged to purchase the student version of Matlab. However, all three professors in the program were 100% ok with students using Octave or whatever software you wanted, as long as the work got done.
Your professor sounds like a dick.
It could also be that some admin or department chair was getting some form of kickback for implementing Matlab, and required subordinate department professors to include it in their curriculum/syllabus. Just look at how Pearson shoehorned their garbage software into upper education, to the point where students are required to pay $100+ per class just to complete homework, and it's no secret that administrators and department chairs receive kickbacks for it.
Even though I'm generally for open-source software, I know that in heavy duty use, highly niche specialisations, and in industries in general it's difficult to find equally competent software. That's why I put emphasize on my specific situation, where it's an introductory course. Heck, we ended up doing what could be done in Python anyway.