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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

#81

Post by jonas21 »

bravura wrote: post #58
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #17

This is not a scalable model of software funding. People may send you money today, because its on their minds, but bills will have to be paid again next month, and next year. Please get yourself, a Patreon account, or something similar. Meanwhile, I'm sure MathWorks is looking for people with exactly your domain knowledge[0]. https://www.mathworks.com/company/jobs/opportunities/?s_tid=...

Would you donate a recurring amount monthly to open-source software development? Imagine a site that auto-bills your credit card every month. You can specify projects you want to support, or just support a portfolio of projects that someone else has devised. If so, please fill out this quick survey. I'm curious if this idea has legs: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfXIqUqsfDoUplWeWYs...

Check out Open Collective https://opencollective.com. They use the sort of model that you're describing.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#82

Post by nstj »

astrodust wrote: post #56
tomphoolery wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patreon is awesome, but it's not enough to pay the bills full-time for most people. That said...anyone who owns an open-source project, is the primary contributor of said project and sacrifices a significant amount of possible revenue at their job to contribute to the project should have a Patreon page where anyone who feels like they want to contribute can do so. It may not be your primary source of income, but gett…

It's a component of your income stream, not a complete solution. If you're doing open-source software as a living it's essential you have: 1. Books: You should at the very least write the canonical book on using a package, tool or application you've written. Amazon residuals might not be high, but they're non-zero. The effort involved in writing a book is considerable but they can pay dividends for a long time. It's…

Nice pragmatic summary. Bravo.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#83

Post by ggame »

astrodust wrote: post #56
tomphoolery wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patreon is awesome, but it's not enough to pay the bills full-time for most people. That said...anyone who owns an open-source project, is the primary contributor of said project and sacrifices a significant amount of possible revenue at their job to contribute to the project should have a Patreon page where anyone who feels like they want to contribute can do so. It may not be your primary source of income, but gett…

It's a component of your income stream, not a complete solution. If you're doing open-source software as a living it's essential you have: 1. Books: You should at the very least write the canonical book on using a package, tool or application you've written. Amazon residuals might not be high, but they're non-zero. The effort involved in writing a book is considerable but they can pay dividends for a long time. It's…

Not getting paid for open source is how the world works.

If you do any of the above you invite yourself to so much criticism that it's not worth it. I have first hand experience of this.

I hope to retire next year to do open source full time with money made from closed source. My audience will not be developers though; I'm soured on them. I'll be targeting a niche group who are actually grateful for free tools and don't feel like it's their life duty to criticize every small thing.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#84

Post by harry8 »

viraptor wrote: post #60
kelnos wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That part has been fixed by https://flattr.com/ You either prepay or setup a periodic payment and then just click the flattr badges whenever you want. They get funded from your flattr pool. No need for the card every time. Unfortunately flattr didn't really take off.

> Unfortunately flattr didn't really take off.

So it is still not fixed.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#85

Post by kafkaesq »

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…

Will his work on Octave--which by all rights should be able to serve as a strong-enough resume by itself to justify his hiring--even be looked at by potential employers?

It'll probably register on the backs of their eyeballs somewhere. Some of them might even might even experience some momentary flash of recognition: "Octave? Right, yeah. Some GNU thingy..." before catching themselves and saying "Well that's, nice. But he doesn't have any Node or Angular, and I don't see any of the buzzwords, like 'microservices', 'serverless' or 'container' I was hoping so far. Smart guy, but too academic. And probably too fossilized at this point in his career to learn any of the shiny new stuff... but what the heck, let's give him a chance -- we'll see how he does on HackerRank".

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#86

Post by geokon »

Jach wrote: post #23
supahfly_remix wrote: post #10

It seems that octave has been overtaken (in mindshare) by python/numpy. Why is that the case?

Did Octave ever have a larger mindshare? It always seemed like the cheapskate's Matlab substitute, but if you know enough Matlab where you might consider a substitute, you probably have a Matlab license already. (Or like me a need to run on an embedded Linux while you work on a python port + a distaste for proprietary software...) Anyway, my thought on why numpy seems more widespread is simple: efficiency. Even Matla…

While R is superficially very similar - having used both, my impression is that it's actually not for the same use-cases as Matlab/Octave. Matlab is primarily for linear algebra, while R is primarily for data-frame manipulation (which is more like SQL). So while they both can do the others job, things get clunky really fast

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#87

Post by xtracto »

anigbrowl wrote: post #28

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. As I've pointed out in discussions on copyright issues, artists value copyright because the patronage model sucked - you're essentially dependent on people's charity and having to beg just to maintain basic econo…

I always thought that a good open-source business model could be to develop a new version of some software and then ask for $X amount (related to how much effort it took to get to the version) to release the code. That's a win-win situation.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#88

Post by dsymonds »

bravura wrote: post #58
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #17

This is not a scalable model of software funding. People may send you money today, because its on their minds, but bills will have to be paid again next month, and next year. Please get yourself, a Patreon account, or something similar. Meanwhile, I'm sure MathWorks is looking for people with exactly your domain knowledge[0]. https://www.mathworks.com/company/jobs/opportunities/?s_tid=...

Would you donate a recurring amount monthly to open-source software development? Imagine a site that auto-bills your credit card every month. You can specify projects you want to support, or just support a portfolio of projects that someone else has devised. If so, please fill out this quick survey. I'm curious if this idea has legs: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfXIqUqsfDoUplWeWYs...

Doesn't Patreon fit this already?

e.g. for one random example: https://www.patreon.com/monkey2

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#89

Post by koolba »

astrodust wrote: post #63
thedevil wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will he be whiteboarded? I like the way you word it - it makes it sound like a form of torture.

The lights in the conference room flickered intermittently, a slight buzz heard each time they dimmed. Something was dripping on to the ceiling tiles from above, a large orange colored stain had developed in the corner. The interviewer leaned in again, his tie loose, his face covered in stubble. He'd been at this for four hours now and it was showing. "Tell us your social media passwords." The candidate flinched back…

This story was fun to read but you lost me at the pass phrase with four numbers as words. That's clearly not dice ware!

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#90

Post by tehlike »

lazarus101 wrote: post #65
jlarocco wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree this type of plea isn't sustainable, but going to work for MathWorks is just a ridiculous suggestion. I can't believe you even seriously suggested it. There's such a giant conflict of interest you might as well suggest RMS go work for one of the remaining legacy UNIX vendors.

I'm sure Apple or Microsoft are looking for people with exactly his domain knowledge. Just imagine RMS as the Keynote Speaker for the next WWDC

Funny you should say that, as a joke i put a flyer on rms' door one day that read: proudly funded by apple. He was not amused :)
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