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

211–220 of 493 posts

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#211

Post by pjmlp »

fsloth wrote: post #189
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 t…

You kind of have this with the other licenses, like the MIT one.

However the sad reality is that outside a few unicorns, working in open source means being sponsored by a large corporation or via support contracts, otherwise better give up.

Both don't suit that well to desktop software for example.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#212

Post by antirez »

Is it just my feeling/bias or projects under the GNU umbrella suffer the problem of not putting the developers at the center of the project enough? One of the things you should get back from doing something like Octave, is to be recognized at least in certain parts of the software community. When an OSS project is a GNU project maybe it is less likely to get the deserved credits, that later may lead to positions, donations, or whatever, compared to having a project on Github, regularly writing to a blog, and so forth. So, without trying to ignore the fundamental problem of a lot of work important for the society that does not compensates the developers as it should, maybe OSS developers need to get smart and try to put themselves at the center of their projects in order to get the visibility that later may save their careers.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#213

Post by sandGorgon »

fsloth wrote: post #189
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 t…

in case of GPL, you merely sell support licenses.

Gratitude-ware is not constrained by what you are selling.. only by 1) what can pass through corporate accounting 2) how convenient it is.

Though it would be nice if the majority of people who intend to make money from opensource use Apache or MIT, however it is perfectly viable to make money from GPL.

This is the crux of the problem - creators generally think "can I sell X with Y license?" and scared and give up. Just look at Pfsense - it is making money using a single click support license contract.

Hell, people will pay for documentation. Make it corporate friendly and for please please generate invoices.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#214

Post by SandB0x »

nuntius wrote: post #32
supahfly_remix wrote: post #10

It seems that octave has been overtaken (in mindshare) by python/numpy. Why is that the case?

Matlab has always been a quirky language. It has good libraries for common math operations, good visualization tools, good documentation, and toolboxes available for many special tasks. There are a number of common pitfalls, with well-known workarounds, that cannot be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility. The performance of a "for loop" is usually dog slow (some special cases were optimized recently). You o…

> The performance of a "for loop" is usually dog slow (some special cases were optimized recently). You often spend hours figuring out how to vectorize your code so it runs decently fast.

A similar story for Python and NumPy on this point, mitigated by NumPy's elegant broadcasting rules. Agree with everything else!

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#215

Post by zerr »

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…

> But you cannot give a paypal link and expect donations. As a company, I cant do that.

Why?

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#216

Post by Nullabillity »

fsloth wrote: post #176
jordigh wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, i…

Perhaps it would be better to put it as "is to make sure people who are already stuck with Matlab scripts don't have to deal with Mathworks".

Scilab is already open source, and GCC has a Fortran backend, so I don't see how those are relevant

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#217

Post by tavert »

pksadiq wrote: post #198
fsloth wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. This is against the GNU GPL license terms. One can't conditionally license some code under GPL. Ie, a software released under GPL can't be restricted for some purpose (here, 'for non-profit'). The "no string should be attached" is for good. Say for example, a project says "For people to help learn writing code, I'm licensing my project under MIT License," it…

Two libraries used by Octave, FFTW and SuiteSparse, both do exactly this - GPL for open source usage, or commercial paid licenses for inclusion in proprietary software (like Matlab).

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#218

Post by simonbarker87 »

zerr wrote: post #215
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…

> But you cannot give a paypal link and expect donations. As a company, I cant do that. Why?

Generally because of existing accountancy practices. In tiny companies, you can get away with it but any company of reasonable size will need a paper trail beyond "I donated to this guy as we use his free software"

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#219

Post by simonh »

pksadiq wrote: post #198
fsloth wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. This is against the GNU GPL license terms. One can't conditionally license some code under GPL. Ie, a software released under GPL can't be restricted for some purpose (here, 'for non-profit'). The "no string should be attached" is for good. Say for example, a project says "For people to help learn writing code, I'm licensing my project under MIT License," it…

You're kind of correct in a pedantic nitpicky way. If you release code under the GPL you can't prevent anyone, such as an Enterprise, from using it under that license. But what you can do is also offer it under a commercial license, that commercial customers might be more comfortable with, and let the user choose which license they want to use it under. This is very common and it certainly seemed clear to me that this is what the poster meant.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#220

Post by izacus »

zerr wrote: post #215
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…

> But you cannot give a paypal link and expect donations. As a company, I cant do that. Why?

Because at least here in EU, you need an actual invoice for every expense that gets put into the accounting books. That expense can then be written off and doesn't count as "profit". Not having an invoice will make any EU-based company probably flatly refuse the payment due to how much accounting and revision issues that causes.

Having a proper invoice (client address, your company address, VAT number) makes life significantly easier for accounting department and thus makes paying money significantly more likely.

(There is also a lesson here for other US-based companies and conferences that can't produce a simple paper saying "Invoice" and a pair of addresses. Yes I'm looking at you 1Password.)

Post reply on HN