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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
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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…
The GP probably meant that people are more than willing to pay for Matlab but they don't realize that Octave needs funding too, and possibly that if you use Octave it's probably worth around the price of a Matlab license, on average, to you.
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> 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…
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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?
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…
That is because open source IS NOT an bussines model. is a distribution model (of code, instead of binary). You need to plug the bussines model to sourcecode, similar how you need to plug one to binary. Unfortunately, give source is in a lot of ways give the MOST SIGNIFICANT VALUABLE OUTPUT a programmer do.
I'll say it again for future searchers of wisdom: Open Source is not a Business Model.
Sometimes I dream that if I ever become very wealthy (either because of something I created or because I won the lottery) I would go around and donate some nice money to these under-appreciated developers/organizations/projects. I mean, if I had billions, wouldn't it be feasible to spend say 1M or even 0.5M to say, 100 projects? 200 maybe? Does this not happen or do we just not hear about it if it ever happens?
There are others too. :)
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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…
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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.
These are solved. User adoption is a completely different issue that applies to almost all donation systems. Even if nobody uses X, it doesn't mean X doesn't exits.
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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 do…