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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

#331

Post by WhitneyLand »

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…

Do people in general realize that software is one of the US's greatest strengths and that there is a staggering amount of innovation done via free/open projects? Or do they just know "SV has some big companies like Apple"?

In all the debates about MAGA or how to invest in the country I don't think i've ever heard someone raise the issue of funding importent open source software (only indirectly).

Actually for any country that can afford to invest, it provides so many benefits economically, competitively, academically, and strategically. Best of all it can boost macro productivity, which benefits everyone even if they have nothing to do with tech.

Even lowly web development which people love to bash as changing too much. you can look at all of it as creative experiments in engineering that eventually end up advancing productivity.

Who handles PR for open source anyway? Shouldn't a professional communications person work on building awareness, explaining the value, advocating for the cause?

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#332

Post by igk »

was_boring wrote: post #315
igk wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile in Germany : as long as the institution can provide a Spendenbescheid, companies can in theory donate all they want and simply deduct it from their taxes. But all the Anglo companies don't grok this, so now students unions etc are moving to what you describe "sponsoring agreements",where they pull any possible benefit they could possibly provide for the companies on paper so it doesn't look like a donation.…

Do you mind elaborating on this? Perhaps an example?

Example : we organised a trip to a large trade fair and got 1000 € support pledged verbally by a large chip maker. As we get to the date of the trip, we get an email in English from the (apparently British) accounting department :they need a contract for sponsorship. We tell them that we thought they just wanted to donate the money (as did other German companies), mails go back and forth.

Finally we slapped their logo on our site for the trip, added the tax we would have to pay on the money, then sent an invoice. As our tax consultant explained to me, they can reclaim the added tax through their own tax return, resulting in a net exchange of exactly 1000€- whatever the labour costs of everyone involved.

Now, this trip was not too bad, but possible complications are :

* What you get sponsoring for needs to be in proportion to the amount of money, leading us to need way more volunteers than originally planned just to deal with the overhead of the sponsor services in a career fair we organised * If you are tax exempt for charitable purposes, you need to very cleanly separate donation funded things from sponsorship or otherwise business funded stuff, because subsidising a lossy business is only rarely legal

German-cultured(DACH) companies get the idea of "give money as a donation because what they do benefits us" a lot more than Anglo-Saxon cultured ones, at least in my experience, which might be reflected in the law

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#333

Post by raverbashing »

igk wrote: post #253
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…

Meanwhile in Germany : as long as the institution can provide a Spendenbescheid, companies can in theory donate all they want and simply deduct it from their taxes. But all the Anglo companies don't grok this, so now students unions etc are moving to what you describe "sponsoring agreements",where they pull any possible benefit they could possibly provide for the companies on paper so it doesn't look like a donation.…

> all the Anglo companies don't grok this

News at 11

Hardest part of dealing with American companies seems to be that they usually don't understand (or don't consider that) things that are different from the US (UK companies seem more open to this, still)

The fact that nobody pays invoices with checks outside of the US for example, or that different countries have different payment methods.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#334

Post by Tepix »

was_boring wrote: post #315
igk wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile in Germany : as long as the institution can provide a Spendenbescheid, companies can in theory donate all they want and simply deduct it from their taxes. But all the Anglo companies don't grok this, so now students unions etc are moving to what you describe "sponsoring agreements",where they pull any possible benefit they could possibly provide for the companies on paper so it doesn't look like a donation.…

Do you mind elaborating on this? Perhaps an example?

I'm not sure he's correct. Donations to charitable non-profits are tax deductible both in Germany and the US IIRC.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#335

Post by raverbashing »

usernam wrote: post #326
raverbashing wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think you understand the implication: there's no way to have a small, side passive income in the 0-10k range. This is a big stopper for many OSS developers that could bootstrap themselves. With this limitation, many developers simply do not (and rightly so) put the effort in accepting anything in that ballpark because it's just extra work.

I agree. You could get payment without a vat number though

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#336

Post by ggame »

wolfgke wrote: post #327
astrodust wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? Perhaps because ggame is not a good marketer. I for example try to promote some ideas (unrelated to the topic here) all the time, but I am talking to a wall. Thus I'm surely not a good salesman, but a very good programmer and mathematician, I think. So don't ascribe do…

I wish it was my lack of marketing and business skills, that way there would be more room for others to succeed.

While I'm not claiming to be a marketing guru, I am successful in business in a different domain. Hence my early retirement.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#337

Post by hahamrfunnyguy »

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…

It's quite likely the guy loves writing code for his project and doesn't want to bother with the mundane operational details of running a business. I don't think there is anything wrong with that.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#338

Post by zild3d »

adw wrote: post #119
jhbadger wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Different communities. Matlab and Octave are big among capital-E engineers, R is for statistics and fights with Python.

Exactly, and matlab is growing in engineering schools and big engineernig firms, not fading out

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#339

Post by whyileft »

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…

Or its a flaw in market capitalism. "When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail"

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#340

Post by xxs »

Asooka wrote: post #325
astrodust wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lights in the conference room flickered intermittently, a slight buzz heard each time they dimmed. Something was dripping on to the ceiling tiles from above, a large orange colored stain had developed in the corner. The interviewer leaned in again, his tie loose, his face covered in stubble. He'd been at this for four hours now and it was showing. "Tell us your social media passwords." The candidate flinched back…

> Oh, and because you've been such a tough-guy you only get to use malloc...once. In the main function Oh yeah? How about I just don't use malloc then: static char ALLTHEFUCKINGMEMORY[1024*1024*1024]; static size_t NEXTBYTE = 0; void *myAlloc(size_t size) { void *ptr = &ALLTHEFUCKINGMEMORY[NEXTBYTE]; NEXTBYTE += size; if (size & 3) NEXTBYTE = (NEXTBYTE & (~3)) + 4; return ptr; } void myFree(void *ptr) { fprintf(stder…

nice one!

for single linked list you can just use an array of the struct and borrow/return via circular list. my C is beyond the rust levels of 20y Golf 2 but I guess I won't sweat over.

An alternative solution would be cheating away and using realloc instead of malloc.

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