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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

#411

Post by 010a »

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?

Most people (think: GNU wizards) who do projects like this don't want to monetize; not for capability reasons, but for philosophical and social reasons. They think monetization is against some principal of free software, or their morals, or that people will stop using their software if they do, or, simply: they're lazy and just want to code, without worrying about menial things like income.

And then, when they can't afford to work on their project anymore, they want our pity. They don't have mine.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#412

Post by jkaunisv1 »

HerraBRE wrote: post #343
wenc wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Something you didn't mention, which I suspect is a major factor in why promoting FOSS alternatives proves surprisingly difficult in education. I remember when I was in university students were acutely aware that tools like PhotoShop, Microsoft* and MATLAB were used in businesses. I doubt this has changed. Even if superior Free options had been available, many of them would still have opted for the "safe" proprietary…

I can't speak to Matlab/Octave but as for Photoshop, FOSS folks always say use GIMP. But the interface is just so terrible compared to PS and I think they underestimate how important that is. Maybe it's configurable but for example, simple things like alt-tabbing between GIMP and other programs was painful because it opened parts of its interface as separate windows, so you'd alt-tab to your browser, then back to GIMP, but it wouldn't show the artboard, just the tool panels. That's a separate alt-tab. And more generally, it felt like everything in GIMP took two extra clicks than the equivalent PS operation.

Most people are goal-oriented when it comes to using software, not ideological, and they'll go with what gets the job done with the least amount of effort.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#413

Post by jordigh »

ISL wrote: post #408
jordigh wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Matlab is still huge. As long as there's a need to run Matlab scripts, there's a need for Octave. The non-Matlab free alternatives aren't really competition for Octave. We're not short on users or developers. We're short on money.

The first possibility has been attempted. In effect, that's partly why the GUI happened: a company really wanted it and paid for its development. jwe has been able to coast on this kind of gig for a while, about 8 years now. It's just that it's never been a very financially stable thing.

The rest of your suggestion seems to be about running a business. That's the thing we've just never really known how to do. There are a lot of business details that we've never really figured out because we'd rather be writing code.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#414

Post by retube »

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…

Maybe the best "gratitude-ware" page you know but am not convinced their communication extends to the front page. No idea what it is this service is or does.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#415

Post by anigbrowl »

wpietri wrote: post #197
anigbrowl wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closed source is a business model because the customer wants what your software does but can't see how it's achieved, so they pay you money to buy a license instead of just re-implementing it.

No. I have a ton of closed-source software in my projects folder. That's not a business model. Neither is open-source software, where I take some of that stuff and throw it up on GitHub. A business model is where I repeatably create value for others and receive money in exchange. A modern software company can do that in a variety of ways, including selling training, documentation, support, custom features, consulting…

Repetition of your assertions isn't an argument.

I make some software. You like what it does and want to use it. I ask for money. If the price is right you give me cash and I give you an executable file.

How is that not a business model?

And what's definitely not a business model is releasing something as open source and hoping that somebody gives me money. Businesses don't just happen. Somebody has to build them.

I never claimed open source was a business model. I said the inability to easily monetize OSS is a limiting factor on its development because people need to eat and pay rent.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#416

Post by anigbrowl »

eyan wrote: post #191
anigbrowl wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, but given the low prospect of getting paid for doing open source work on it will be performed primarily by those who don't need a return on the time invested.

I totally agree with this analysis.

I apologize for not articulating it more clearly in the first place. I meant to contribute an off-the-cuff economic sketch, not start a semantic argument over corporate terms of art.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#417

Post by mperham »

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…

(sidekiq dude here)

I had no idea what I was doing. I found a local lawyer who incorporated me for $1000. He wrote the commercial license for my software for another $750. I had a friend who was a CPA and taught me how to keep books. I was terrified but literally every business is started this way.

Need help? Walk outside your house and ask the five nearest businesses who they use for legal and accounting. Talk to a professional.

I'm also happy to chat about starting an OSS business during my weekly happy hour, all welcome:

http://sidekiq.org/support

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#418

Post by anigbrowl »

pjmlp wrote: post #231
anigbrowl wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is maybe a reaction to the way AT&T made Unix so expensive and inaccessible to hackers for so long that the idea of charging $$$ for something whose marginal cost of production was effectively $0 that the idea of charging money was morally repulsive to a lot of key figures in the movement. In a way OSS seems like the sort of thing that would have worked great in some hypothetical enlightened communist sy…

> AT&T made Unix so expensive and inaccessible to hacker Actually you got it wrong, it was precisely because AT&T could not legally charge the prices other vendors were selling their OSes, that UNIX got adopted by universities and small business, thus spreading its use in the industry. The ones charging lots of money for UNIX clones were Sun, HP, Digital, HP, ...

I thought sun was in partnership with AT&T when system V came out, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix appears to support that idea, but my first-hand memories have dimmed with time (cause it's not something I care about that much) and you may well be right.

I do remember, um, liberating an overlooked copy of system V/386 on 5.25" floppies that I found in a storage cupboard when I worked at PC Magazine in 1992 :-)

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#419

Post by anigbrowl »

krylon wrote: post #209
anigbrowl wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but not everyone wants to be part of a business. What if there were some umbrella nonprofit that collected funds for open source development and redistributed to various projects in approximate proportion to their deployment in production, as well as seed or micro-capital to encourage new contributions?

I may have been misunderstanding the whole thing, but wasn't the FSF supposed to kind of do that (among other things, but still)?

I'm not sure, I haven't followed the topic closely enough in recent years to form an opinion.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#420

Post by anigbrowl »

tavert wrote: post #188
anigbrowl wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but not everyone wants to be part of a business. What if there were some umbrella nonprofit that collected funds for open source development and redistributed to various projects in approximate proportion to their deployment in production, as well as seed or micro-capital to encourage new contributions?

You mean like http://www.numfocus.org ? That's not quite how their fiscal sponsorship agreements work, but close enough.

Did not know about this. Thanks for sharing, this is very encouraging to see.
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