I added a slide about this to the talk I'm giving tomorrow on funding for open source math software at University of Rochester: http://wstein.org/talks/2017-02-09-wing-sage/slides.pdf
Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave
111–120 of 493 posts
Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think you're discounting donations to the ACLU that have only happened as of late because of an orange catalyst.
Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave
#113Earlier 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…
> 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…
Python, PHP, and Ruby are not great languages. Google, Facebook, and Twitter are successful inspite of them.
I'm not saying open source is bad, I'm saying Dev culture in not paying for tools is bad. I agree that ideally it would be different.
I speak from decades of experience doing Dev tools inc open source. All of my friends are practitioners in the space. We're all obsessed on how to get people to use better tools. It is something I've put a lot of thought into. I've personally spent over $200K on salaries for people to build open source tooling. If I could make a business out of it I would spend more. But I can't. I had to build an entirely separate company to make money.
Edit (addendum): People who have paid $1500 for my software are grateful that I'll even talk to them; whereas open source freeloaders constantly demand I do more free work for them.
Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave
#114It 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…
The problem with Octave for most of its life was it never had a very good GUI, and that made it hard for university departments to adopt as course software. I know we tried to push Octave in our department, but it just never took off. That, plus the Mathworks offered some pretty good educational pricing.
Octave also never had the span of toolboxes that MATLAB had. With MATLAB, you could always find fairly usable toolboxes that covered most engineering computation needs.
Octave was on par with MATLAB on some fronts, but it rarely exceeded MATLAB capabilities. And it was worse than MATLAB on tooling maturity. People hate The Mathworks for charging an arm and leg for its software, and for breaking backward compatibility, but most people will admit the MATLAB environment is pretty polished and seamless compared to open-source offerings in the same space.
So far no one has mentioned Scilab (http://www.scilab.org/). Scilab is a much a better MATLAB alternative than Octave, though Scilab code is less compatible with MATLAB that Octave code.
Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave
#115Sometimes 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?
Most people would rather save 1,000 people from Malaria in Africa than give 1 white college educated man living in one of the richest counties on earth a year's salary to write code from his home office. (I am sure it happens, but I am sure that it is pretty low on the donation list)
For what it's worth, http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/ins... estimates about $3000 per life saved (which I will grant is not the same thing as "malaria case prevented"). So a year's salary for a good developer would be on the order of 30-150 lives saved, depending on market and definition of "good"...
Agreed with your overall point, though.
Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave
#116This post today is what is wrong with open source software. If someone knows jwe, then they should tell him that lots of corporates and startups WANT to support stuff like this.
But you cannot give a paypal link and expect donations. As a company, I cant do that. I need an invoice. Hell, if you can get a business account, I daresay you will get subscriptions.
I like to call this "gratitude-ware".
Check out Sidekiq Pro and their experience making 80k USD per month. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12925449
At first I built Sidekiq as an LGPL project and sold commercial licenses for $50. Revenue was laughably small, but the response I got was encouraging: people told me they were saving $thousands/mo over previous solutions and wanted to buy the license just to give me something as thanks.
Octave currently offers support packages for which you have to write in to the maintainer and have an email discussion. Compare that with Sidekiq : http://sidekiq.org/products/pro
Its one of the best designed gratitude-ware page...even works amazingly well on a mobile phone.
We personally also buy pfsense licenses https://www.pfsense.org/our-services/gold-membership.html
TL;Dr Donations wont work. Engineers cant give an excuse to corporate accounting. Make a pro subscription with ANY "pro level" feature. I can get my accounting to sign off. And no "contact us to find out about support contract".
Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Most insightful comment in this mishmash. I'll say it again for future searchers of wisdom: Open Source is not a Business Model.
Yeah yeah but that doesn't solve the problem of programmers needing to eat and pay rent, so I guess the answer is why not? If people can't afford to to invest time in writing OSS even if it's widely respected and reused, then that limits the development of open source. I mean here's this guy with a ~25 year body of work which everyone agrees to be of pretty high quality and he's broke. That ain't right.
Saying 'it's not a business model' is basically equivalent to saying 'I don't have to worry about money.'
Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave
#118I 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. B…
Ha, I'd love to see a youtube series in which famous old-school open source devs apply for web front-end gigs. Episode I, Linus Pair Programs.
Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave
#119Earlier 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…
Different communities. Matlab and Octave are big among capital-E engineers, R is for statistics and fights with Python.
Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave
#120You might want to check with the Julia folks. They now have a company (Julia Computing) backing the project. I don't know if they are hiring right now, and if so, whether you'd be a good fit, but it couldn't hurt to ask.
Might be a better alternative to working for MathWorks! Julia is an open source project with many brilliant developers and mathematicians contributing.
I don't see a 'jobs' page, but CEO Viral Shah (and everyone else, but Viral is who I know) is on twitter, and is a great guy.