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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

#251

Post by scrollaway »

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…

I don't believe there is a single OSI or common license that makes it straightforward for an author to say "This has all the open source freedoms, except for commercial uses" and sell the exception.

When I see people asking if they can do this, they get laughed out of the room by others who claim that "open source freedoms" does not restrict commercial use.

This is kind of a serious issue. Artists get such a license, a high quality one (CC-BY-NC). Programmers don't. Programmers are not licensing law experts, they won't make their own, and if they do they won't do it right.

If you make it as easy to ask commercial bodies for money and still be OSS as it is to just build stuff for free, this story you mention will happen far more often.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#252

Post by sandGorgon »

cabalamat wrote: post #234
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…

> 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/

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#253

Post by igk »

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...which is exactly what it is.

Source : book keeper for a students union for years, dealt with this shit with our tax consultant all the time

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#254

Post by chii »

fnord123 wrote: post #237
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…

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.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#255

Post by chii »

vbernat wrote: post #232
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…

> GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. You are likely to have a hard time to get external contributions with that kind of licensing.

are there really that many external contributions for most projects? and if there are, i would imagine that it's a "simple matter of accounting" to distribute the wealth received accordingly.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#256

Post by chii »

hueving wrote: post #133
ggame wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python, PHP, and Ruby are not great languages. Google, Facebook, and Twitter are successful inspite of them. I'm not saying open source is bad, I'm saying Dev culture in not paying for tools is bad. I agree that ideally it would be different. I speak from decades of experience doing Dev tools inc open source. All of my friends are practitioners in the space. We're all obsessed on how to get people to use better tools…

If you need that much tooling for a python project, you are overengineering or writing really poor code. I've never found a case where someone is using tons of 'better tooling' for a well engineered project. 'better tools' are crutches to support a 500,000 line spaghetti code base.

The reality is that there are lots of spaghetti code bases, and better tooling is a godsend for those.

There is no situation where better tooling isn't better!

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#257

Post by midgetjones »

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.

That's a really odd thing to get wound up about.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#258

Post by fsloth »

fnord123 wrote: post #237
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…

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…

>> Blockchains? >I'm scared to ask what you mean by this.

To copy from another reply: "I meant it would be convenient if there was some platform to maintain the licence contract chain so that a dual licenced project could use a third party dual licensed library, and the license fees would be forwarded to all license owning parties in a transparent manner."

I'm not claiming it would be a good idea. Just a thought.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#259

Post by galfarragem »

fsloth wrote: post #156
dheera wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of thoughts: - Octave won't die. It won't die even if you ditch it altogether. A lot of companies depend on it because licenses are free and that makes it easy to do massive parallel computations by launching thousands of instances. Matlab doesn't let you do that. As long as it stays GPL, the employees within those companies and academic institutions will continue to contribute to it. (Python is competition,…

"Build something cool" is not sound financial advice for a person in a dire situation. The only reason it seems to work is because in the internet thousands are rolling the dice on this and you only hear of the few fraction of them who make it.

"Do not teach a starving man to fish".

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#260

Post by gjjrfcbugxbhf »

chii wrote: post #255
vbernat wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. You are likely to have a hard time to get external contributions with that kind of licensing.

are there really that many external contributions for most projects? and if there are, i would imagine that it's a "simple matter of accounting" to distribute the wealth received accordingly.

I'm no accountant or lawyer but I would not attempt to distribute money like you are suggesting internationally. Just thinking about the employee/consultant/fee based nature of potential contributors and the tax statuses of every jurisdiction in the world makes me shudder. And money laundering regulations... And funding terror regulations...
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