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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

#421

Post by pjmlp »

anigbrowl wrote: post #418
pjmlp wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you have some time to refresh memory.

"A Narrative History of BSD by Dr. Kirk McKusick"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds77e3aO9nA

"Unix came into many CS departments largely because it was the only powerful interactive system that could run on the sort of hardware (PDP-11s) that universities could afford in the mid '70s. In addition, Unix itself was also very inexpensive. Since source code was provided, it was a system that could be shaped to the requirements of a particular installation."

http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/frs122/unixhist/chen.htm

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#422

Post by anigbrowl »

jlarocco wrote: post #43
anigbrowl wrote: post #28

There's something fundamentally broken about the open-source model when you can invest so much time and npt get any sort of economic return. This seems like a huge limiting factor on open-source development. As I've pointed out in discussions on copyright issues, artists value copyright because the patronage model sucked - you're essentially dependent on people's charity and having to beg just to maintain basic econo…

I see what you're saying, but I can't feel sorry for people in this position. It's a no brainer that giving away a product for free won't be a sustainable way to earn a living. It's not like there's a big mystery around how to make money off of software.

You're right, but I would like to find a solution to that problem. If a person's skillset is in programming and not business administration, I want to see them rewarded for the value they create without their being reduced to the indignity of begging.

Essentially I'm proposing private-sector communism; let's find a way to raise money from people who depend on open source, and then find a reasonably good way for figuring out who to throw some at. It doesn't have to be perfectly proportional to the popularity of what they're doing, the goal is reduce financial insecurity rather than have a Great Accounting.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#423

Post by BeetleB »

sedachv wrote: post #405
BeetleB wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I think you're missing the point of the thread.

Obviously, you should vectorize your code and avoid explicit loops. In both Octave and NumPy

However, what the thread is pointing out is that if you do have explicit for loops, Octave is much slower than NumPy.

For the code I was writing, I had trouble vectorizing a particular piece of code. I'm sure if I spent many extra hours, I'd figure out some way. But why should I when it's 7x faster in NumPy without vectorizing?

And whatever way I would discover for vectorizing it in Octave would likely work for NumPy as well. It'll be a rare exception that NumPy is slower than Octave.

For me, the only reason to use Octave is if someone hands me Matlab legacy code. For my scientific computation, NumPy/SciPy has always been superior.

Ironically, Octave usage is inherently tied to Matlab's existence. Were Matlab to disappear, Octave would have little use when it comes to developing new code. I cannot think of a good reason for someone new to the field to develop in Octave, other than the need to interface with others who use Matlab.

I know this comment sounds critical, but I'm not anti-Octave. When I first started using it, I was very impressed, and I learned far more about Matlab by using Octave and reading Octave's docs than any docs from Mathworks. As a Matlab clone, it is superb.

It's just that now the alternatives to Octave are superior. Personally, I would like to see development continue for Octave, just because I appreciate it so much as an open source project. But the reality is when I give new young scientists advice, it is almost always "Use NumPy/SciPy".

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#424

Post by capitalcrew »

jordigh wrote: post #390
sandGorgon wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are overcomplicating this. The better examples to look at are pfsense and handsontable. There is really no major distinction between the license and free software. Its basically an "early access right", a special package repo for pro customers and in case pfsense case.. an ebook. In sidekiq pro case, the "support" is a right to send email. If i may say so, that scales with the money you receive. How to set it up?…

The situation really is complicated if you are committed to the constraint of keeping Octave free. Sidekiq pro is just selling non-free software. It's not just the right to send email. My second idea was to move to an open core model: hold back more complex or enterprise-specific features from the OSS version, sell those features as an "expansion pack" on top of Sidekiq. Thus, Sidekiq Pro was born. This proved to be…

What is a "stooge license"?

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#425

Post by avar »

sandGorgon wrote: post #213
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…

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…

> In case of GPL, you merely sell support licenses.

This really isn't an option for a lot of things, and gives you some really perverse incentives to make things complex enough that they need support. Who's going to buy support licenses for /bin/ls, or most of coreutils, or most of libc?

You'll get people buying support licenses for MySQL and other difficult to configure & operate codebases, but not for the vast majority of code they use on their systems.

I work for a big company that runs a shit-ton of open source, we sponsor the two/three biggest projects we use, but by volume it's 0.1% of the total number of open source projects we use, at best.

This is a general problem for open source, everyone's using a huge long tail of infrastructure code that needs to be maintained, but any one company has no strong reason to support it.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#426

Post by jordigh »

capitalcrew wrote: post #424
jordigh wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The situation really is complicated if you are committed to the constraint of keeping Octave free. Sidekiq pro is just selling non-free software. It's not just the right to send email. My second idea was to move to an open core model: hold back more complex or enterprise-specific features from the OSS version, sell those features as an "expansion pack" on top of Sidekiq. Thus, Sidekiq Pro was born. This proved to be…

What is a "stooge license"?

I keep hearing from engineers who can't donate that I should do something like sell a box with an Octave CD in it or a piece of paper that says it's a license but not actually do much beyond that, maybe only a vague promise to give priority support.

It's a donation in all but in name so that the accounting department will approve it.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#427

Post by yumaikas »

sytelus wrote: post #177

Some ideas for OP: - Evangelize Octave in education, especially K-12. Community for Octave is rather small and K-12 education has lots of potential users and money. - Apply for NSF grants - Create specialized plugins that people might want to pay for commercial usage. Think of it as your consulting gig. - Write book not on just using Octave but something more generic like fun with math that can have larger audience.…

I like the idea of Octave Gold. I would totally buy something like that.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#428

Post by splitbrain »

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…

That's a nice idea. But Open Source authors have lives too. Friends, Family, etc. as much as I'd like to live rent free, I wouldn't want to move into a "camp" for Open Source authors.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#429

Post by vijayr »

splitbrain wrote: post #428
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…

That's a nice idea. But Open Source authors have lives too. Friends, Family, etc. as much as I'd like to live rent free, I wouldn't want to move into a "camp" for Open Source authors.

If someone has enough money, they can lease/buy an entire building (say a 50 apt building in NYC, Seattle or wherever) and let people live in those apartments (for $1/month in rent or something like that). This doesn't need to be a camp or tents in some remote place. This way people can live in those apartments with their families. In cities like NYC, rent is most normal people's biggest expense.

All it takes is just one rich person (there are many in tech) who believes in the idea (or some variation of it) and it can be done.

That said, I was mostly thinking of young/single people when I wrote it. People with kids have more challenges

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#430

Post by mperham »

stuaxo wrote: post #296
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…

You can license your code however you like as long as you own the copyright. You can license it as GPL and sell an alternative commercial license for money.
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