Supervisor does not allow use of commercial software for student project, against student's interests My supervisor does not allow me to use commercial software for my project. I believe that they want to reuse, modify and build upon what I do and thus are interested only in tools/libraries that are widely-accepted in the scientific community (which I do not intend to pursue a career in). 

The commercial software products license costs are not an issue as students can either officially use the software for free or licenses are quite cheap (e.g. less than 5 Euro for students). As I know which tools are used in the kind of jobs I want to get in, I do not need the supervisor "to guide my software decisions" to help me in this aspect. I am also already quite proficient in one of the commercial software tools I want to use, but I feel my supervisor is not (and also has no interest in learning more about it - I do not blame him for this). 

When signing up for the project, usage of commercial software was not explicitly excluded. The topic of the project itself is actually interesting, it is just the software that we cannot agree on.

How might I persuade them to change their view? If impossible, how can I make the most of this situation?

This question is related to what I am asking about, but it is more normative in nature.
The student license can be cheap, but the standard license is probably not. If the chair doesn't have funding for a standard license, or they are not interested in this specific software, the lab will end up with an unusable piece of software as soon as you leave. This is certainly not in the interest of the lab.


  What would you advise me to do?


There's not much you can do: either accept the chair's choice of software or go find a project in a lab which uses your preferred choice of software.