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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

#301

Post by jordigh »

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…

The reason for the acidity is quite simple: we believe non-free software like Matlab to be unethical. You should not be restricted by a license manager, there should not be any restrictions on who you can share your software with (Matlab's license says you can only share Matlab's own source code with other Matlab users), you should have complete access to the source code (Matlab hides a lot of juicy secrets in its hidden source code, such as the exact algorithm of its backslash operator, or virtually everything interesting in its image processing package). You deserve better than this. You deserve free software.

This is why Octave is part of GNU, and why it's GPLed.

As for Scilab, they don't have quite the same aim as Octave. They don't aim to implement the same language so you can take your Matlab scripts away from Matlab, without change. They have a compatibility layer that does it partly, but there is still a need for implementing the same language. Imagine if the only way to run Javascript or Python was to sign away your rights to some company.

Freemat is a bit more comparable in aim to Octave, but it has a smaller contributor pool.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#302

Post by pferde »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #292
ggame wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, he shouldn't do something he enjoys doing for free, because someone else somewhere might eventually want to make money off the same thing? That doesn't sound right.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#303

Post by EdiX »

Free startup idea: Patreon for Open Source

* Users signs up to OSPatreon, downloads OSPatreon app that creates ospatreon directory in $HOME/.local/share/ or other operating system appropriate location, then creates a cronjob (or whatever) to rerun after one month

* Open Source projects that want in add a snippet of code that, when the application closes, writes the amount of time the application ran to $HOME/.local/share/ospatreon/

* At the end of the month the OSPatreon window pops up, shows the user a list of ospatreon projects the user has used, sorted by decreasing total time, lets user select how much to donate and the share each application gets (default: proportional to time the app was used)

* You collect money from the user, pocket some percentage, distribute the rest to OS projects.

Startup name: Fosstreon.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#305

Post by vijayr »

This is probably just wishful thinking, but I wish I had enough money to buy a decently large property and just let people stay there (everything free, including food/stay/healthcare etc) and work on projects like these, for as long as they want. Tech has so many rich people, I dunno why this can't be done. Even if it is just 100 high caliber people staying/working in such a community, they can generate immense value for all of humanity.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#307

Post by appleiigs »

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/

6. Django

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#308

Post by superquest »

Could some kind of micropayment scheme help these projects make some money?

For web servers you might charge per request served. For text editors you might charge per unit time the editor is being used.

It'd be interesting if the maintainer could define an acceptable salary, and all "consumers" would just split the bill by proportion of their usage according to the kind of metrics mentioned above.

I would gladly pay such a bill if nearly all the money went straight to the developer, I could cap my contributions, and it was extremely easy to opt-in. Ideally the package manager would read some dotfile or ask me! The problem with projects like Bountysource is that people will never track down all the OSS projects they depend on and figure what would be a reasonable donation to give them. Too much agency is required of the user to achieve meaningful adoption.

Has anything like this been attempted?

Edit: clarifications ...

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#309

Post by fnord123 »

chii wrote: post #254
fnord123 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong disagree. There should be funding bodies for projects like this who can fund projects and also provide a semblance of orchestration. The Linux Foundation (with the Core Infrastructure Initiative) and the Cloud Native Compute Foundation are already working in the right direction, imo. There are other organizations that work through contracting work to develop free and open source software. Red Hat and Canonical…

i feel that adding middleman organizations sap the margins, and also gives those middleman organizations that do the funding some measure of power that i feel is also undeserved. I think the dual licensing method would extract the most value and give the most of said value back to the developers.

> i feel that adding middleman organizations sap the margins

That may be, but the point is to keep coders coding. The overhead cost of delegating fund raising to another person who isn't committing code is worth it.

>, and also gives those middleman organizations that do the funding some measure of power that i feel is also undeserved.

I think that it's often very deserved if the organization is well managed. If programmers can keep their hands on keyboards instead of rattling a tin cup then I think it's a better solution than the dual license.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#310

Post by inimino »

Y_Y wrote: post #210
realPubkey wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have watched how people use crypto-currencies to donate for a long time. I also tried it for a own privacy-project which has over 10.000 users / day. Since you can see the donation-amount in the blockchain, I'm free to say that "blockchains" are not the solution to this problem. People do not donate, no matter if via paypal or bitcoin.

"10.000" What number is this? Is it ten? Ten thousand? I don't think decimal (thousand) separators are necessary when you can write the number without, use scientific notation or the number in words. But there is an English-speaking standard (comma) and an international standard (thin space). Considering that there are at least five better options I think this usage is perverse.

It's ten, followed by three decimal places of zeros, because that's obviously what makes sense in the context, right? /s
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