I've been thinking of doing trading stuff, too, though I'm fairly new to the subject area.
Out of curiosity, have you tried your Matlab code in Octave? Does it actually use some libraries only in Matlab?
I ask because I recently did the
Computational Investing (Part 1) course on Coursera where they use Python/Numpy/QSTK and I know a number of people from there moved on to the Machine Learning course which uses Octave/Matlab (either works, code written for one often works without changes in the other) and some are implementing that code in Python. I would expect there may be more contributors to an open source project that was written in a relatively more accessible language like one of the ones those courses cover.