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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

#101

Post by username223 »

tomphoolery wrote: post #39
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=...

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…

> Patreon is awesome,...

Is it? AFAICT, they take a 5% cut in exchange for setting up recurring billing. (I'll ignore any ethical questions about automatic recurring billing; I likely get free satellite radio because someone else forgot to cancel it.) Are there any stats about how readership/viewership translates into payment that are more informative than the PR department's "Average Pledge" of $5?

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#102

Post by astrodust »

ggame wrote: post #83
astrodust wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

That's how it used to work. That's 1990s thinking back when people would do these things purely out of love, and when those using it were hackers or ramen-noodel eating entrepreneurs.

Now huge corporations are using open-source tools, and some huge corporations have been built with open-source tools. Where would Google be without Python? Where would Facebook be without PHP? Where would Twitter have gone without Ruby?

That's why having an official method for giving back is important. Node has shown tremendous leadership here in setting up an NPM corporation (https://www.npmjs.com/about) that makes it easy for corporate concerns to donate without accounting concerns: Writing personal cheques to people to "donate" is out of the question. Giving to a foundation is noble. Paying for a support contract is reasonable. The difference might seem superficial, but it's important.

> I'll be targeting a niche group who are actually grateful for free tools...

There's nothing wrong with finding your own niche and doing it out of love and passion. That you're able to do this is great, but some need to concern themselves with how to make a stable, sustainable living that's not predicated on having a large amount of money saved up.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#103

Post by wavewash »

hakcermani wrote: post #9

I beseech every Andrew Ngs ML course student to contribute a little. I just did.

This. I'm taking the class now. Octave is invaluable and I wouldn't be able to complete the course without it. I've donated and agree that anyone that takes the course to contribute too.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#104

Post by alexhutcheson »

geokon wrote: post #86
Jach wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Out of curiosity, what are the pain points you run into using R for linear algebra? I've found it's not too bad for the basic things I've used it for, but my needs admittedly weren't very complex.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#105

Post by toomuchtodo »

dyarosla wrote: post #100
ggame wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a ton of cynicism here with very little substance. Perhaps over generalizing developers; many of whom do appreciate open source?

You can't buy groceries or pay your mortgage with appreciation.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#106

Post by rhodysurf »

vanattab wrote: post #25

I have not tried the octave GUI in a couple of years but back then it was awful. In my opinion this has always been octaves biggest weakness. If they would fix this I am sure they gain significantly marketshare from matlab.

In 4.0 it looks waaayyyyyyy better. Much more modern and more like Matlab.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#107

Post by [deleted] »

username223 wrote: post #101
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…

> Patreon is awesome,... Is it? AFAICT, they take a 5% cut in exchange for setting up recurring billing. (I'll ignore any ethical questions about automatic recurring billing; I likely get free satellite radio because someone else forgot to cancel it.) Are there any stats about how readership/viewership translates into payment that are more informative than the PR department's "Average Pledge" of $5?

[deleted]

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#108

Post by dostoevsky »

As a soon-to-be engineering graduate, I am very thankful for Octave. I've used it (instead of MATLAB) for projects involving numerical methods, control systems, image processing, and all kinds of data manipulation. While it may not be as powerful as MATLAB for certain use cases, it is an amazing piece of software.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#109

Post by astrodust »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #105
dyarosla wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a ton of cynicism here with very little substance. Perhaps over generalizing developers; many of whom do appreciate open source?

You can't buy groceries or pay your mortgage with appreciation.

Appreciation comes in many forms, like how many people have developed a new-found "appreciation" for the New York Times or the ACLU of late.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#110

Post by toephu2 »

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…

Yes you can bet the farm that if he interviews at Google, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, Dropbox, etc. they will all whiteboard his ass (if he even gets an interview --because of his age). They don't give a f' who you are or what you did. In my google onsite they didn't even ask about past projects (who cares really?). The question is can you whiteboard?
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