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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

#181

Post by anigbrowl »

trome wrote: post #143
josephagoss wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, but not everyone wants to be part of a business. What if there were some umbrella nonprofit that collected funds for open source development and redistributed to various projects in approximate proportion to their deployment in production, as well as seed or micro-capital to encourage new contributions?

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#182

Post by astrodust »

ggame wrote: post #141
astrodust wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Then instead of bitching about the tools or the attitude of developers, which does nothing, why not work to encourage people to support it properly?

For example: I think personal donations can only go so far. I'd rather see an easier sell for simple "support packages" that developers can recommend to their organization that helps further development. "We're really invested in package X and it'd be great to be listed as a supporter on their page, it's cheap marketing and they'll help us with technical support issues! We could try a $50/mo. subscription..."

Compared to $50K annual server licences that's an easy sell if it can be phrased in a culturally compatible way.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#183

Post by astrodust »

seagreen wrote: post #154
astrodust wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. So Linux was so good . . . that it enabled a world where normal people don't use it, but instead use JS apps that store information on other people's servers? Because that's what I hear when you say Linux i…

Normal people use Android phones. Which use Linux.

Normal people use shared hosting. Which often uses Linux.

Normal people use Linux a lot more than they realize. I think it's fine they don't have to pay attention to that, that computers can be invisible that way, but if you call yourself someone familiar with technology you can't be ignorant to it.

So do you have an argument or just a whole lot of misplaced anger?

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#184

Post by knlje »

jhbadger wrote: post #61
sotojuan wrote: post #54

Earlier 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…

0 years ago when I was in grad school, everybody was still using Matlab. Ok, some used R and NumPy but 80% Matlab. Such a collection of sparse matrix routines (direct solve, iterative solve, preconditioning, eigensolvers, SVD) is very useful in applied sciences.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#185

Post by astrodust »

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.

Having a community leader who isn't afraid to crack some heads to keep people in line is always important. People like this poison any community.

Make a Code of Conduct and use it to control your community rather than let your community control you.

It's like parents complaining their kids are "out of control" and "there's nothing I can do". Seriously? We've been raising kids for a hundred thousand years. This shit isn't new.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#186

Post by astrodust »

gkop wrote: post #157
toomuchtodo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're discounting donations to the ACLU that have only happened as of late because of an orange catalyst.

It seems like you two are saying the same thing.

Yeah: Sometimes it takes Agent Orange to strip away all the confusion and lay bare what the things worth protecting are.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#187

Post by petters »

santaclaus wrote: post #134
toephu2 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

What she or he said is mostly true, though. But there are always exceptions.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#188

Post by tavert »

anigbrowl wrote: post #181
trome wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, but not everyone wants to be part of a business. What if there were some umbrella nonprofit that collected funds for open source development and redistributed to various projects in approximate proportion to their deployment in production, as well as seed or micro-capital to encourage new contributions?

You mean like http://www.numfocus.org ? That's not quite how their fiscal sponsorship agreements work, but close enough.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#189

Post by fsloth »

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…

My heart breaks each time I discover a free tool of recognition is developed by some altruistic talent who lives at a near poverty level while their work generates millions in added value.

I suppose the simplest way would be to offer dual licensing. GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. The problem is, if the source code you are working on depends on third party GPL software it's very hard to do that.

I think this is what should be fixed. There should be some way to have a chain of dual licensing, so that if someone uses a dual-licensed library, they can forward revenues simply to the original license owner from their proprietary license sales.

Source remains open, and developers can eat (and pay for other amenities civilization has to offer).

Blockchains?

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#190

Post by petters »

jhbadger wrote: post #61
sotojuan wrote: post #54

Earlier 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…

Or Python. I switched from Matlab to Python and Numpy and Matplotlib and Jupyter a few years ago and haven't looked back. They really are better in many ways.
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