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

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#131

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

sandGorgon wrote: post #116

This 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 Pr…

Under rated post here. The key is to build a bigger solution around Octave, including say database or ML or simulation. A billable piece of IP. And streamline the surrounding commerce.

ALso key is to locate Octave within the solution space, e.g. Startups who can't afford matlab. High schools. A formal online course. Makerspaces. Job seekers wanting to work with matlab.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#132

Post by hughw » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:30 AM UTC

While recruiting at UT Austin petroleum engineering school recently, I was impressed how embedded Matlab has become there. The students use Matlab for big semester projects and everyday scratchpad computation. I believe it's a required skill. I don't know the licensing arrangement Mathworks made with them. It's common for software companies to donate licenses to engineering and science departments. It's a loss leader, and presumably lots of the students will pull Matlab licenses into their employers later. But Matlab is so ubiquitous there, and so integrated into the curriculum, it could be that money did change hands.

I wonder if there's an opening along those line for a revenue stream for Octave?

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#133

Post by hueving » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:30 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…

If you need that much tooling for a python project, you are overengineering or writing really poor code.

I've never found a case where someone is using tons of 'better tooling' for a well engineered project. 'better tools' are crutches to support a 500,000 line spaghetti code base.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#134

Post by santaclaus » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:30 AM UTC

toephu2 wrote: post #110

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?

> They don't give a f' who you are or what you did.

I know a few people who Google has hired into specific roles directly due to their previous work...

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#135

Post by astrodust » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:32 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…

> Python, PHP, and Ruby are not great languages.

What high horse did you fall off of? They may not be perfect languages, but they get the job done, and for many people they've made their career possible. Greatness doesn't come from beauty, PHP is the ugly bastard-child produced when Perl and C got drunk one night and had a baby, it comes from utility.

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

Maybe that's bad, but you know what's worse? Back when you had to spend huge amounts of cash to get a barely working compiler because there were no viable open-source alternatives. This was on top of the huge amounts of cash you had to fork out for an operating system from a vendor like Sun or SGI. Oh, and you also had to drop thousands more on a proprietary system that could run it.

So, yeah, good times back when nobody could afford to do anything but at least the people at Sun and SGI had jobs.

Then Linux happened, then scripting languages like Perl, Python and PHP proved themselves capable of getting the job done, and the modern web came about. This would never, ever have happened without those tools.

The single greatest thing to happen in the last twenty years is that you can get a computer that you can develop on using free languages, resources, and tools for under $10. That price is $0 if they use someone else's computer, or borrow time at a library. That, and that alone is enough to make these languages great.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#136

Post by hkmurakami » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:33 AM UTC

hughw wrote: post #132

While recruiting at UT Austin petroleum engineering school recently, I was impressed how embedded Matlab has become there. The students use Matlab for big semester projects and everyday scratchpad computation. I believe it's a required skill. I don't know the licensing arrangement Mathworks made with them. It's common for software companies to donate licenses to engineering and science departments. It's a loss leader…

Iirc student licenses are ~$100, and full licenses are ~$2500, with $1000-$1500 for additional libraries.

I wonder if schools pay $0, $100, or somewhere around $300-$500.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#137

Post by hkmurakami » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:35 AM UTC

grzm wrote: post #80

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…

I don't understand how YC can fund non-profits like VotePlz and the ACLU while not funding stuff like this. Whenever I read something that starts off along the lines of "I don't understand" or "It makes no sense" I wonder how much time the poster has taken to put themselves in the shoes of those they can't understand and rough out ideas that might make sense to them. Look at VotePlz and the ACLU, the other startups Y…

Put that way, YC's politically leaning activities remind me of lobbying. Supporting policies that are good for its business models.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#138

Post by aoeu345 » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:37 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…

For what it's worth, I used to live with a guy who used the Magic Lantern firmware add-on for certain Canon cameras, which was very powerful free software that had a community forum. He would tell me about how he'd shit talk the devs for not including some feature or when something wasn't working. It's pretty terrible.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#139

Post by brilliantcode » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:38 AM UTC

> I would love to continue as the Octave BDFL but I also need to find a way to pay the bills.

Breaks my heart to see such devoted developers having so much trouble paying bills for the work they've done.

I truly believe that this problem can be solved-by crowdfunding open source developments that rivals commercial status quo, we can decouple ourselves from restrictive licensing structures while paying people's bills for those who contribute to the development.

Imagine if Octave just got $3000 USD / month, that should help with basic costs of living (not knowing where the original author is) and also incentivize continued development-25 years of unpaid work is a tragedy.

I still have not figured out all angles but this is my dream. To help open source developers get paid and the work that becomes BSD or MIT licensed will offer a strong alternative to commercial softwares.

I'm wondering if anybody else shares similar vision, please subscribe at http://letsopensource.com or feel free to reach out at my email in my profile.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#140

Post by robotresearcher » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:41 AM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #99

harry8 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately flattr didn't really take off. So it is still not fixed.

The problem as stated was: "it's prohibitively expensive (from a payment processing perspective) to receive lots of small, sub-dollar payments", and "a lot of friction if you're relying on your users to pull out their credit card info for such a small amount". 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 e…

You missed the parent's point which is that just because a product exists, doesn't mean a the problem it addresses is solved in practice. Even a very good solution needs to be known about, readily available, priced correctly, and not suppressed by other forces, as well as extant.