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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

#401

Post by edblarney »

st3v3r wrote: post #384
edblarney wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There should be funding bodies for projects like this who can fund projects and also provide a semblance of orchestration. " A much better way than 'government funding' would be for users to just pay for it . It's called 'capitalism' it works very well. Oftentimes, it's difficult for the government and centralized bodies to know 'what to fund' and what not to - it's a hard thing, it can get political. Money goes ent…

Have you been on the internet for a while? You know that anything someone can get without paying for it, most people will go for it. Pirating video games, torrenting movies, music, ad blockers, etc. And honestly, this idea of perfect meritocracy, the idea that if you don't get funded, then your project was crap, has been disproven a long time ago. There was a kickstarter that raised insane amounts of money for someon…

He has a valuable, entrenched product that is apparently used by a lot of people and provides value for them.

If those people won't pay a small sum to use this - or can find some easy substitute, then that could be an indication that this open-source project simply isn't that valuable.

If there is no easy substitute, and he is creating consistent value, he should be able to get some kind of revenue for something, possibly enough to pay himself and a few others to make it better.

It's not always easy, but it's not remotely irrational for him to try a few things. There's no reason for him to 'work for free' to help other people in their endeavours. They can pay him, and everyone still ends up a winner. It's called 'comparative value' - it's how most of the economy works. It's good. Apparently, he wants to 'get a job somewhere' writing code. How are his future employers going to pay him? By asking people to pay for the software that he writes. Or something along those lines.

In fact - given that he does have a 'high degree of expertise' in this open-source he made, that apparently people are using - it would make good economic sense overall if he (and possibly some others) were working on that, as opposed to him 'getting a job' elsewhere. It's a matter of plugging into the revenue stream. Again - not trivial, but something that could surely be tried.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#402

Post by radarsat1 »

enjalot wrote: post #389
radarsat1 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Two things though: * Developers, in general, are not business people. This may be different in Silicon Valley, but in a lot of the world, programmers have spent their life concentrating on one thing, learning to program. That doesn't mean they don't just "not know how" to start a business and find clients. It means they don't even know how to do the basic, first steps to registering one, knowing what to char…

I think your second point is the real open question that should be explored deeper. Your first point however is harmful and patronizing. If you can find coding answers on stackoverflow you can certainly google for information on opening an LLC and a business checking account. There is no need to bring in business partners, you can contract an accountant and even an attorney without compromising anything and just payi…

Man, I'm sorry but I have to disagree. I may understand how to handle template metaprogramming in C++, but personally I find the complexities of business and society to be complete and total roadblocks for setting up my own business. Moreover I have no idea how to find partners who could take care of that part for me. It may seem trivial to you, but that just shows how little you understand certain programmer's (and people's) mindsets who are not knowledgeable in this area.

Using your analogy: to some (and I include myself), telling them "just start a business", is like telling your grandmother to post a question on stackoverflow when she can't figure out which little picture to click to open the word processor.

You have to understand that some things that from your point of view are easy, are hard for other people. Starting a business is NOT "brushing your teeth." There's basic "taking care of yourself," and then there's how to create a self-sufficient semi-profitable business to work on projects you enjoy. I don't see how you can make this false equivalence.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#403

Post by dllthomas »

ufo wrote: post #300
dllthomas wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Yeah, you are correct that you can't add a non-commercial clause to the GPL and have it remain the GPL (or compatible with the GPL in either direction).

You could choose to only grant GPL licenses directly to non-profits. They would be free to pass along the same rights to commercial entities, if they chose. It's possible that in a practical sense this would present enough of a hurdle for larger companies to prefer to pay (but plenty possible that it would not).

It is also possible to grant other licenses for situations where the GPL prevents some particular for-profit activity - that kind of approach is presently making some people some money, although the incentives can be weird.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#404

Post by jordigh »

BeetleB wrote: post #392
jordigh wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hi…

>This is why Octave is part of GNU, and why it's GPLed. And why NumPy/SciPy will overtake Octave, if it hasn't already.

I wish them all the best. Numpy is free software. As long as people stop using Matlab and non-free software to get do scientific computing, I don't care if they use Octave or Numpy or R or Julia. We're all on team free software. Julia and R are also GPLed, and they seem to be doing well.

As long as people need to run Matlab scripts without Matlab, there will be a need for Octave.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#405

Post by sedachv »

BeetleB wrote: post #394
SandB0x wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

>A similar story for Python and NumPy on this point Not as similar. When I was in grad school and encountered NumPy, I ported over my Matlab code to NumPy. It was hard to vectorize and so I had an explicit for loop (in both code bases). NumPy ran 7x faster. Did not really drill down to whether it was the loop itself or the operation in it, but I suspect it was the loop itself. Matlab really has a slow for loop.

Matlab/Octave is an array programming language. You are supposed to use array and matrix operations. If you are using a for loop you are writing Matlab code wrong.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#406

Post by beagle3 »

wenc wrote: post #114
Jach wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Octave ever have a larger mindshare? It always seemed like the cheapskate's Matlab substitute, but if you know enough Matlab where you might consider a substitute, you probably have a Matlab license already. (Or like me a need to run on an embedded Linux while you work on a python port + a distaste for proprietary software...) Anyway, my thought on why numpy seems more widespread is simple: efficiency. Even Matla…

The problem with Octave for most of its life was it never had a very good GUI, and that made it hard for university departments to adopt as course software. I know we tried to push Octave in our department, but it just never took off. That, plus the Mathworks offered some pretty good educational pricing. Octave also never had the span of toolboxes that MATLAB had. With MATLAB, you could always find fairly usable tool…

There's also FreeMat http://freemat.sourceforge.net/ which at the time had much better Matlab compatibility than Octave, and a much better GUI (comparable to Matlab's circa 2007 or so, which was when I compared them).

And for some reason, it was virtually unknown - Octave is superfamous compated to FreeMat.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#407

Post by jkaunisv1 »

vijayr wrote: post #305

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…

I'm very hopeful that YC's city-building efforts (if they come to fruition) will include something like this. And it's something I plan to do when I get land in the next decade (not the food/healthcare part but at least a place to stay which IMO is the biggest expense).

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#408

Post by ISL »

jordigh wrote: post #366
radarsat1 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Two things though: * Developers, in general, are not business people. This may be different in Silicon Valley, but in a lot of the world, programmers have spent their life concentrating on one thing, learning to program. That doesn't mean they don't just "not know how" to start a business and find clients. It means they don't even know how to do the basic, first steps to registering one, knowing what to char…

These two points are very important. I've wanted to make Octave a business, but I just never knew how to start. I tried to find people who would help us get started, but the only ones I could find wanted to either compromise Octave's freedom (e.g. sell non-free extensions) or wanted some kind of way of turning Octave into a giant billion-dollar business very quickly. I couldn't find anyone who could help us do someth…

I'm an Octave fan. I generally prefer it to Matlab, and do my daily scientific computing in Octave. To me, the biggest threat to Octave is SciPy/NumPy. The students I work with all prefer those libraries. I haven't switched largely because of my own custom libraries and because the the Octave syntax is more appropriate for numerical work.

One possibility: Find a company that buys a ton of Matlab licences in order to get access to a specific library. Implement that library well, GPLed, for a price that is below their annual license cost.

It's a tiny niche (big company, small library), but if it can be found, it is one the Octave team could do well. Everyone, except Mathworks, would win.

Proprietary libraries do offer sponsoring companies greater competitive advantage, but the first mover to a cost savings is already a winner.

Getting a long list of big Matlab customers is a place to start. Sometimes they boast about the biggest fish in advertisements.

If running out of money is a critical problem for Octave development, make finding GPL revenue the core goal. Octave is now complete and capable enough that it can take care of itself for a year with bugfixes alone.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#409

Post by ISL »

jordigh wrote: post #366
radarsat1 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Two things though: * Developers, in general, are not business people. This may be different in Silicon Valley, but in a lot of the world, programmers have spent their life concentrating on one thing, learning to program. That doesn't mean they don't just "not know how" to start a business and find clients. It means they don't even know how to do the basic, first steps to registering one, knowing what to char…

These two points are very important. I've wanted to make Octave a business, but I just never knew how to start. I tried to find people who would help us get started, but the only ones I could find wanted to either compromise Octave's freedom (e.g. sell non-free extensions) or wanted some kind of way of turning Octave into a giant billion-dollar business very quickly. I couldn't find anyone who could help us do someth…

I'm an Octave fan. I generally prefer it to Matlab, and do my daily scientific computing in Octave. To me, the biggest threat to Octave is SciPy/NumPy. The students I work with all prefer those libraries. I haven't switched largely because of my own custom libraries and because the the Octave syntax is more appropriate for numerical work.

One possibility: Find a company that buys a ton of Matlab licences in order to get access to a specific library. Implement that library well, GPLed, for a price that is below their annual license cost.

It's a tiny niche (big company, small library), but if it can be found, it is one the Octave team could do well. Everyone, except Mathworks, would win.

Proprietary libraries do offer sponsoring companies greater competitive advantage, but the first mover to a cost savings is already a winner.

Getting a long list of big Matlab customers is a place to start. Sometimes they boast about the biggest fish in advertisements.

If running out of money is a critical problem for Octave development, make finding GPL revenue the core goal. Octave is now complete and capable enough that it can take care of itself for a year with bugfixes alone.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#410

Post by astrodust »

ggame wrote: post #328
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…

None of the ideas you present are new to me. I've tried them all. I have many friends in the space who have tried them all as well. If anything worked we'd be the first to know. "If it can be phased in a culturally acceptable way" - have you ever tried to intentionally change a culture? It's damn near impossible. Having it as a prerequisite to success practically guarantees failure.

"Tried" and "persevered" are two different things. The people I know who've found success in these endeavours have only found it by sticking to it and grinding until they got somewhere.

They had to endure multiple failures, but each time they failed less than the last. Success was really the one where they failed the least, and after that they can chart their own path, they're finally above water.

> have you ever tried to intentionally change a culture? It's damn near impossible.

Yes, I have. It's not impossible, it's just very hard. It requires stubborn determination.

Don't expect anyone to care about your project unless you make them care. Don't expect anyone to pay for your project unless you ask them to. You need to engage, you need to evangelize, you need to promote. Relentlessly.

For example, I haven't heard one bit of promotion from you in all of these comments. Not a peep. Does that mean whatever you're doing isn't worth mentioning?

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