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Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

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Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#71

Post by viraptor »

jhbadger wrote: post #61
sotojuan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said it yourself—Octave isn't trendy or cool.

The problem is I think Octave missed its window. 20 years ago when I was in grad school, everybody was using Matlab and a competitive open source version would have been a killer app. I looked into Octave at the time, but it was basically a toy at that point. I looked into it recently, and it really has come a long way, and even has an official GUI similar to Matlab's, but these days Matlab is kind of fading out and…

I did my uni ~10 years ago and I made a point of using Octave when everyone else was using Matlab. It worked just great for all the ODE and statistics exercises. Nobody else used it though.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#72

Post by mhermher »

samfisher83 wrote: post #42

Why can't a company like google just hire and let him work octave like 20% of the time. They can afford it.

Better yet, some consortium of universities. I've found that Matlab usage is probably like >90% academics.

Wouldn't paying for contributions to Octave devs not save them money versus Matlab licenses?

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#73

Post by n00b101 »

pm90 wrote: post #24
n00b101 wrote: post #8

Meanwhile, MathWorks annual revenue is over $800 million.

Honest question: what exactly do you hope to put light on with that comparison? I don't think the developer in question has ever claimed that he is a fantastic businessman: quite the contrary, he is (apparently) a very talented developer who is seeking funding to continue a project which others may find useful. I understand that the current economic system in the US greatly favors forming a business around a good ide…

Octave is a clone of MATLAB, which is MathWorks' flagship product. They have identical programming languages and similar libraries. MATLAB's initial release was in 1984, and Octave's was in 1988. So there is a direct comparison in terms of product features, target market and development period. A critical difference is that one is closed-source commercial product and the other is an open source GNU project. The huge difference in success makes for an interesting comparison of these two models of software development. It reminds me of an essay by an a16z partner about "Why there will never be another Red Hat" [1]

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-wa...

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#74

Post by crb002 »

I'd apply to Mathworks as BDFL of Octave and work on Matlab support for open source packages.

So many areas to work on. Integrating D3.js, integrating with Python machine learning/dataframe libraries, FPGAs, SMT solvers like Z3 and CVC4, ...

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#75

Post by crb002 »

crb002 wrote: post #74

I'd apply to Mathworks as BDFL of Octave and work on Matlab support for open source packages. So many areas to work on. Integrating D3.js, integrating with Python machine learning/dataframe libraries, FPGAs, SMT solvers like Z3 and CVC4, ...

Also ask Wolfram for some funding. They would love to gobble Mathworks clients and could do so with better Octave integration.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#76

Post by photojosh »

jhbadger wrote: post #61
sotojuan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said it yourself—Octave isn't trendy or cool.

The problem is I think Octave missed its window. 20 years ago when I was in grad school, everybody was using Matlab and a competitive open source version would have been a killer app. I looked into Octave at the time, but it was basically a toy at that point. I looked into it recently, and it really has come a long way, and even has an official GUI similar to Matlab's, but these days Matlab is kind of fading out and…

And 10 years ago when I was in grad school (dropped out though), Python was on the rise with numpy and matplotlib. Coming from a programming background, it was an easy choice and I'm still using those today. They've got more usable for people with less programming experience with Jupyter notebooks etc.

Was briefly tempted by Octave, but it just didn't happen.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#77

Post by anigbrowl »

kelnos wrote: post #47
was_boring wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody has solved the micro-payment problem yet what is this problem?

I assume the parent is referring to the problem where it's prohibitively expensive (from a payment processing perspective) to receive lots of small, sub-dollar payments. Also there's a lot of friction if you're relying on your users to pull out their credit card info for such a small amount.

Actually no, sorry for the lack of clarity. I was thinking more of the administrative problem for the consumer.

Like, I read a lot of news, and every news outlet I read would like me to subscribe. But while I do have couple of subscriptions, and if I was a bit better off I'd throw down for a few more, but if I were to buy a subscription to every outlet that I read 1 or more articles a month from then not only would it get expensive, it would generate an annoyingly large number of renewable transactions. I don't want 30 different subscriptions, especially when I might read a publication frequently for several months and then take a break from it for a similar period. I really like the journalism at The Atlantic for example but I haven't gone to their website for maybe 6 months; in this febrile political climate I've been reading more instant news and a bit less analysis/longitudinal work.

As you say I don't much care to pull out the credit card for a small amount, but I'll make smallish one-off purchases when I find something cool. What I'd like would be that I pay some fixed amount like $25/month and someone else takes care of distributing it approximately proportionate to where I spent my attention.

When book/magazine stores were more popular I used to buy a lot of magazines because I could go to one place and get a wide variety but not necessarily always the same ones every month. But it was only one or two financial transactions with a single vendor, the magazine store. This was more expensive than subscriptions, but more flexible plus I didn't get nearly as much junk mail. I hate marketing and when you buy magazine subscriptions you get swamped with it.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#78

Post by Swizec »

anigbrowl wrote: post #69
Swizec wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's something fundamentally broken about the open-source model when you can invest so much time and npt get any sort of economic return. This seems like a huge limiting factor on open-source development. The problem we have is that OSS creators don't realize, and often willfully ignore, the fact that nothing about opensource says you can't charge for delivering value to people. Sure, their ability to copy it th…

I think this is maybe a reaction to the way AT&T made Unix so expensive and inaccessible to hackers for so long that the idea of charging $$$ for something whose marginal cost of production was effectively $0 that the idea of charging money was morally repulsive to a lot of key figures in the movement. In a way OSS seems like the sort of thing that would have worked great in some hypothetical enlightened communist sy…

Sure, marginal cost is $0, I agree. But building and maintaning huge swathes of million (billion?) dollar infrastructures/architectures for enterprises for free feels somehow more wrong than building a small business that supports a few maintainers' families.

Or as a famous talk once said: fuck you, pay me.

https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#79

Post by josephagoss »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #50
josephagoss wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're entirely correct here. These OSS creators have leverage but are either unaware or unwilling to take advantage of their advantageous position.

Is there no middle ground between OSS maintainers/contributors going hungry and them holding businesses hostage for ransom?

To be honest I hope there is middle ground, I just cannot see it. I want OSSc creators to be well compensated. These people are providing the world with an incredible service.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#80

Post by grzm »

vcistan-inmate wrote: post #41

I don't understand how YC can fund non-profits like VotePlz and the ACLU while not funding stuff like this. All of the startups funded by VCs use free software, often exclusively, but these VCs continue to refuse to adequately fund its development. Marc Andreessen even publicly boasted about how much OSS his companies use[1], which he of course doesn't pay for. I also shudder to think of how Eaton will fare on the jo…

I don't understand how YC can fund non-profits like VotePlz and the ACLU while not funding stuff like this.

Whenever I read something that starts off along the lines of "I don't understand" or "It makes no sense" I wonder how much time the poster has taken to put themselves in the shoes of those they can't understand and rough out ideas that might make sense to them.

Look at VotePlz and the ACLU, the other startups YC supports, and Octave. Do you see any similarities? Any differences? The first that jumps out at me is that YC doesn't support open source for open sources' sake. It supports organizations that serve some sort of purpose other than writing software; another way to describe this is that the organizations have business models. Some of the startups might be developing services that support software development or tech rather than something consumer facing, but it's the service, rather than the software, that is being supported by YC. In that sense, VotePlz and the ACLU are similar to the startups YC supports. Octave isn't like this. What is Octave's business model, other than to develop software that can be used by others?

Please don't get me wrong. I see a lot of value in open source projects, and have used and contributed to open source projects both professionally and personally. I don't have any experience using Octave, but have no issue giving it the benefit of the doubt that it's a worthwhile project.

Perhaps I'm mistaken. Are there software projects similar to Octave that YC supports? Is there a meaningful difference between YC's startups and VotePlz and the ACLU, and open source projects such as Octave?

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