Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

lists.gnu.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 493 posts

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#141

Post by ggame »

astrodust wrote: post #135
ggame wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

As you point out, sufficiently good. But not great.

I agree that the world is a better place with open source. I simply wish there was a culture were developers opened their wallet and supported it. That way we would have even more of it.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#142

Post by Anechoic »

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…

I'll add my voice as someone that would gladly pay $100/year for a few no-support type "licenses" (and I just made a long overdue donation to jwe).

That said, I would understand if he didn't want to try an licensing like that for fear of angering The Mathworks.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#143

Post by trome »

josephagoss wrote: post #79
toomuchtodo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there no middle ground between OSS maintainers/contributors going hungry and them holding businesses hostage for ransom?

To be honest I hope there is middle ground, I just cannot see it. I want OSSc creators to be well compensated. These people are providing the world with an incredible service.

Entire businesses like Red Hat & Suse are built on the middle ground. There is room in the market for OSS creators to be compensated for their work.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#144

Post by ggame »

realharo wrote: post #130
ggame wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the point I was alluding to is that the market should be much bigger than it is. And it would be great if open source contributors could make money from their work.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#145

Post by noufalibrahim »

brilliantcode wrote: post #139

> 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…

I wonder if it's because the time investment demanded of the BDFL is so high. If there were more people and each put in smaller amounts of their time to work on the project, then it would be possible to sustain it without having to depend on the charity of users.

I get the feeling that projects like Python operate like this but I have no data to back my claim.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#146

Post by eyan »

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…

> Saying 'it's not a business model' is basically equivalent to saying 'I don't have to worry about money.'

No, Sir. I think the point flew past you. Saying "it's not a business model" means that you need to worry about how to sustain yourself from the get-go if you want to go where ever pleases you, open or closed source.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#147

Post by ggame »

hueving wrote: post #133
ggame wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I personally use Vim and Tmux for my IDE. But I build tools for people who aren't me and they need tools specialized for their job.

Even general purpose devs can benefit from better compilers and code completion.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#148

Post by zxcvvcxz »

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 also shudder to think of how Eaton will fare on the job market should he actually be forced to seek regular employment. Will he be whiteboarded?

'Whiteboarding is a form of programming torture in which a candidate must code algorithms he will never use on the job on a whiteboard in front of other people, causing the individual to experience the sensation of inadequacy.'

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#149

Post by joshlemer »

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=...

Although Patreon is nice, it seems to be more focused on artists and the like. A similar project focused on Open Source Software is Bounty Source Salt (https://salt.bountysource.com/)

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#150

Post by dheera »

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…

A couple of thoughts:

- Octave won't die. It won't die even if you ditch it altogether. A lot of companies depend on it because licenses are free and that makes it easy to do massive parallel computations by launching thousands of instances. Matlab doesn't let you do that. As long as it stays GPL, the employees within those companies and academic institutions will continue to contribute to it. (Python is competition, but there are still plenty of Octave supporters.)

- You might consider working for a company that is built around Octave. They would likely gladly welcome you as well as support you in spending a percentage of your time to maintain it, since their business depends on it.

- Build something that people will pay for. Like a decent GUI for Octave that does everything Matlab's GUI does. Or a few awesome closed-source toolkits. That alone might support your personal income needs.

Post reply on HN