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

291–300 of 493 posts

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#291

Post by iSnow »

sandGorgon wrote: post #252
cabalamat wrote: post #234

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. Maybe there could be a startup that helps people monetise their free software output?

+100 this is a YC-fundable startup. Here are the projects I can think of: 1. Celery - jeez. It runs half the world's high availability python software, yet has severe funding crunch. 2. Octave - obviously 3. Jupyter+Pandas - http://jupyter.org/ 4. Vue.js - http://vuejs.org/support-vuejs/

>The OpenSSL project management team consists of four people, and the entire development group consists of 11 members, out of which 10 are volunteers; there is only one full-time employee, Stephen Henson, the lead developer

I mean, it's only OpenSSL which was for a long time the foundation of much of the online economy.

Or the various BSD's.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#292

Post by paulryanrogers »

ggame wrote: post #83
astrodust wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a component of your income stream, not a complete solution. If you're doing open-source software as a living it's essential you have: 1. Books: You should at the very least write the canonical book on using a package, tool or application you've written. Amazon residuals might not be high, but they're non-zero. The effort involved in writing a book is considerable but they can pay dividends for a long time. It's…

Not getting paid for open source is how the world works. If you do any of the above you invite yourself to so much criticism that it's not worth it. I have first hand experience of this. I hope to retire next year to do open source full time with money made from closed source. My audience will not be developers though; I'm soured on them. I'll be targeting a niche group who are actually grateful for free tools and do…

"I hope to retire next year to do open source full time with money made from closed source."

Sounds like pulling the ladder up afterward. Perhaps the niche you plan to target with FOSS would have supported a fresh graduate's new career. But your work may condition that market to expect it for free.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#293

Post by gpvos »

chillydawg wrote: post #282
gpvos wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still do not get it. What explodes when a company donates (instead of paying for something with an invoice)? I cannot imagine that it is illegal.

It's all legal and fine, it's just how do you get it approved? You're not actually buying anything, nothing will stop working and no projects will be impacted without the PO. In a large company, this effectively makes it impossible. The solution is to just pretend you're buying a minimal support contract and that'll get approved no worries.

Shouldn't be a problem for smaller companies though? Or is the accountant going to withhold approval or something?

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#294

Post by raverbashing »

ojilles wrote: post #279
sandGorgon wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For me (working at a large(r) corporation) this hits then nail on the head! >> Gratitude-ware is not constrained by what you are selling.. only by 1) what can pass through corporate accounting 2) how convenient it is. I've bought support contracts and promptly shredded the support contact information effectively to just make a donation for software we use extensively but is free. Make it easy for us to pay you. Finan…

> I've bought support contracts and promptly shredded the support contact information effectively to just make a donation for software we use extensively but is free.

I understand the intention, but you should have "used" support.

You don't need to be picky and call it for every minor thing, but calling attention to the author about a problem or issue that can be improved is valuable

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#295

Post by raverbashing »

usernam wrote: post #264
izacus wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sig…

Having a VAT number in most EU countries has a fixed cost that is non-negligible. For a realistic example in Italy, having a VAT number implies a minimal fixed yearly cost of ~300eur (combining all various expenses) even for zero income. If you already are an employee, any extra income is likely to be taxed higher and require extra bookkeeping, to the point that cost parity is only attained if you can invoice for at…

It's not worth if you're making less than 300eur per year.

For any reasonable company (even a single founder one), 300eur is nothing

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#296

Post by stuaxo »

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…

Pypy and Wine both have good models.

With pypy, funding goes towards particular projects (e.g. STM).

This may not be suitable for all projects or developers (libjpeg turbo being an example - he wants the freedom to be research lead and work on what he likes).

If anyone, then the FSF should be looking into this problem, study all the models used, which are successful and provide some sort of template model for people to use.

Licensing may be an issue, can you do the Sidekiq or Wine model when your code is GPL ?

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#297

Post by ufo »

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…

Selling software via a proprietary license to an enterprise can be bad for open source because it means that the enterprise doesn't need to obey the terms of the GPL. They are free to modify and adapt the code without contributing the changes back to the community, which kind of ruuing the point of the GPL in the first place.

This method also only works if the copyright if fully owned by a single person or entity, with all code contributors signing a contributor licensing agreement to give away their copyrights to a single entity. This is problematic because now there is the possibility that this single entity gets bought out by an evil corporation (say, Oracle), which can choose to continue developing the project without releasing the modifications under an open source license.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#298

Post by fb03 »

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…

Which languages do you consider great? (just curious to know where you are coming from)

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#299

Post by stuaxo »

annnnd wrote: post #248
cabalamat wrote: post #234

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. Maybe there could be a startup that helps people monetise their free software output?

THIS!!! In open-source there is a huge difference between value generated and value collected. The people behind open-source projects are often clueless (sorry, but it's true) how to extract value from their work while keeping community happy. How about a service which helps authors monetize open-source software for some percentage?

A webpage page with a list of projects that take funding, their licenses and how successful the funding is would be a great start.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#300

Post by ufo »

dllthomas wrote: post #203
pksadiq wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> One can't conditionally license some code under GPL. You can release code under however many incompatible licenses as you'd like, as long as you own all of the code in question.

I think they were referring to the "GPL for non-profit" part of the comment. You either don' release it as GPL at all or you release it as GPL for everyone, which means that for-profit companies can use the software free of charge (as long as they obey the terms of the license).
Post reply on HN