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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

#171

Post by fsloth »

aoeu345 wrote: post #138
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…

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.

People think the interface layer they see is all there is and all developers need to do is add some goodwill to make the software function.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#172

Post by tavert »

dheera wrote: post #150
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,…

> a company that is built around Octave

How many of those are there? I give talks pretty frequently where I start by asking people in the audience what tools they regularly use for technical computing, and I'm legitimately surprised the few times anyone says they use Octave for things beyond classroom-level work.

No offense intended to its developers, but Octave as a project seems like misdirected effort to me. Matlab the language isn't the most useful thing to try to emulate, Matlab the environment and tool set for getting non-software engineering jobs done is why people use it. For example, an increasing portion of the people who still use Matlab do so largely because of Simulink, for which there isn't a comparably effective open source alternative yet (you can sometimes use Modelica but there's less overlap in users than you'd think).

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#173

Post by Swizec »

dboreham wrote: post #164
Swizec wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's something fundamentally broken about the open-source model when you can invest so much time and npt get any sort of economic return. This seems like a huge limiting factor on open-source development. The problem we have is that OSS creators don't realize, and often willfully ignore, the fact that nothing about opensource says you can't charge for delivering value to people. Sure, their ability to copy it th…

Have you actually tried this?

Similar. I put out free technical blogs and charge for technical books. For a demographic that's allergic to paying, engineers are really profitable.

An extra $30k/year is pretty nice for a sidehustle I think. Mostly on track to do double that this year.

And of course, if a company asks for consulting, I charge. But I'm not focusing on consulting these days.

However a company is paying me to develop tech material for them as a content marketing strategy. At $600/article it's not a bad gig and I'm probably undercharging.

So .. uh .. the answer to your question is Yes, sortof.

You can read more about it here: https://swizec.com/blog/learned-6x-income-4-years/swizec/734...

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#174

Post by bayesian_horse »

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…

The easiest explanation would be he just didn't ask YC.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#175

Post by sandGorgon »

saurik wrote: post #163
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 am honestly extremely interested.) It seems like Sidekiq is offering a slightly differen piece of software as the Pro version?

which is A Good Thing. Again, its those accounting people again "whats the difference between this and the free version".

Selling open source is like selling any other enterprise software - you need to prove value.

An alternative is to sell support (like pfsense).. which is pretty much the right to file bugs. We also buy a license for Handsontable Pro : we get right to file bugs and the fact that we get new features 3 months before the free version.

Its just a way to package gratitude-ware to pass accounting inspection.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#176

Post by fsloth »

jordigh wrote: post #128
StavrosK wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why such acidity towards Mathworks? I've use Matlab decades ago with someone elses licensing so I don't really know the details.

"our entire purpose for working on Octave is to make sure people don't have to use Matlab."

That's a really negative way to put it. Isn't Scilab a viable Matlab alternative as well. Are you hoping to block people from using that as well? What about Intel's fortan compiler...

The point is, it's much more approachable to describe things in positive terms rather than negative when all you are essentially doing is offering a product in a not-ruled-by-monopoly market.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#177

Post by sytelus »

Some ideas for OP:

- Evangelize Octave in education, especially K-12. Community for Octave is rather small and K-12 education has lots of potential users and money.

- Apply for NSF grants

- Create specialized plugins that people might want to pay for commercial usage. Think of it as your consulting gig.

- Write book not on just using Octave but something more generic like fun with math that can have larger audience.

- Create an edition like Octave Gold for $5 which has zero feature differences but has some cool logo or chrome or fun cosmetic thing. You will be surprised how many people want to pay for it.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#178

Post by anigbrowl »

wpietri wrote: post #127
anigbrowl wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

Closed source is a business model because the customer wants what your software does but can't see how it's achieved, so they pay you money to buy a license instead of just re-implementing it.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#179

Post by anigbrowl »

eyan wrote: post #146
anigbrowl wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Obviously, but given the low prospect of getting paid for doing open source work on it will be performed primarily by those who don't need a return on the time invested.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#180

Post by anigbrowl »

Swizec wrote: post #78
anigbrowl wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is maybe a reaction to the way AT&T made Unix so expensive and inaccessible to hackers for so long that the idea of charging $$$ for something whose marginal cost of production was effectively $0 that the idea of charging money was morally repulsive to a lot of key figures in the movement. In a way OSS seems like the sort of thing that would have worked great in some hypothetical enlightened communist sy…

Sure, marginal cost is $0, I agree. But building and maintaning huge swathes of million (billion?) dollar infrastructures/architectures for enterprises for free feels somehow more wrong than building a small business that supports a few maintainers' families. Or as a famous talk once said: fuck you, pay me. https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1

Indeed. I'm just making a guess about the motivations of some OSS leaders, and a shallow one at that.
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