Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave • Hacker News Board

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#121

Post by nathancahill » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:03 AM UTC

dflock wrote: post #67

bravura wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You mean like this: https://salt.bountysource.com/ Obviously, there are also lots of open source people earning income from Patreon and the traditional bountysource too - but salt is the Bountysource clone of Patreon, specifically for OSS.

The idea is a good one. But see how none of the projects break $3k/month? And how drastically it drops down to $500? There just isn't that much money moving in that model. Period.

The Open Collective project mentioned in your sibling looks even nicer, but tops out at $5k/year.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#122

Post by cx1000 » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:05 AM UTC

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?

If that concerns you, gratipay might be up your alley.

> The most obvious difference between Gratipay and Patreon is that we don’t skim 5% off the top. Instead, we’re funded on our own platform using a pay-what-you-want model, exactly the same as any other user of our service. Gratipay is funded on Gratipay.

https://gratipay.news/how-is-gratipay-different-from-patreon...

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#123

Post by jordigh » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:09 AM UTC

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, ...

This wouldn't work. The Mathworks has never been friendly to us. Working for the Mathworks would mean the death of Octave, and I know jwe doesn't want Octave to die.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#124

Post by jordigh » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:10 AM UTC

bordercases wrote: post #36

Can you get academia to give you funding to continue the project? It's a common model in the bioinformatics world.

He used to have exactly that, but his academic position ended 8 years ago.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#125

Post by jordigh » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:11 AM UTC

beambot wrote: post #97

n00b101 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Similar libraries"? Hardly. There is no comparison with the toolboxes , which is where most of the domain-specific value lies with MathWorks.

Some toolboxes are quite comparable. The signal processing, image, and control packages in Octave, for example.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#126

Post by jordigh » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:12 AM UTC

williamstein wrote: post #111

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

Thanks, Will. I hope things are working out for you too.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#127

Post by wpietri » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:14 AM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #117

eyan wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 at all. Closed source isn't a business model either.

A business model is where you figure out who will give you money in exchange for value delivered. If you need money, you probably should think about that. And then you'll need to spend some time on execution of that plan.

I get that programmers just want to make things and have people use them. I feel that too. But pretending that "open source" is a business model is essentially just denying economic reality. It's the same thing when young artists grumble about having to earn a living somehow when they'd rather just be creating art.

People can definitely make a living with open-source software. But it doesn't happen by magic, any more than it does with closed-source software. It takes thought and work. That work is grubby and mundane and a bit banal, but it has to get done.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#128

Post by jordigh » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:20 AM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #26

pinewurst wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working there, though, might preclude further work on Octave.

I'm guessing that when you're the BDFL of Octave you can negotiate a compromise.

The Mathworks is not our friend. They view Octave with disdain, and our entire purpose for working on Octave is to make sure people don't have to use Matlab.

I think jwe would be miserable working at TMW. It would be the ultimate insult to his life's work.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#129

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:22 AM UTC

gech wrote: post #38

jlarocco wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way. I don't know what the relationship between MathWorks and Octave is, but probably the last thing MathWorks wants to do is give the creator their biggest competitor access to their trade secrets and proprietary information.

Maybe as humans we should be thinking bigger than things like secrets

[deleted]

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#130

Post by realharo » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:28 AM UTC

ggame wrote: post #113

astrodust wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>I'm saying Dev culture in not paying for tools is bad.

I don't know, JetBrains seems really popular to me. Off the top of my head, I know of a few commercial tools that seem to be doing ok? (judging by their continued existence), e.g. https://blackfire.io, http://undo.io, https://scrutinizer-ci.com, etc.

Of course, a non-open-source programming language doesn't stand a chance today because of the massive network effects required for success, but that seems natural (people want to use what they already know, what they know is often what they learned in school or on their side projects).