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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

#361

Post by whit537 »

superquest wrote: post #308

Could some kind of micropayment scheme help these projects make some money? For web servers you might charge per request served. For text editors you might charge per unit time the editor is being used. It'd be interesting if the maintainer could define an acceptable salary, and all "consumers" would just split the bill by proportion of their usage according to the kind of metrics mentioned above. I would gladly pay…

> people will never track down all the OSS projects they depend on and figure what would be a reasonable donation to give them. Too much agency is required of the user to achieve meaningful adoption.

Yes! This gets at the B2B question mentioned elsewhere on this thread. At Gratipay, we're working on integrating package managers to help with aggregation. We've already loaded up all npm packages with stubbed out pages like:

https://gratipay.com/on/npm/express/

Now we're working on adding the ability for package maintainers to easily claim their packages on Gratipay, and then companies can upload a package.json or something and give a chunk of money to their entire dependency chain. Happening here:

https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/pull/4305

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#362

Post by fnord123 »

edblarney wrote: post #355
mbreese wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be "government" funding. Sometimes funding via traditional capitalistic sources (starting a company) just isn't the right model to fund something worthwhile. Think about low-level libraries... Also, the overhead of starting a company (or project-specific foundation) can be more inefficient than just running as a one-person shop. Maybe the author is really good at software, but bad at marketing. Gov…

"Why couldn't there be an umbrella organization (not gov't) that accepts donations on behalf of the community" Why would you do that? Why not just have people pay for it? No overhead needed. "But there is a good model that is already working in other fields - the grant process" 'Grants' are speculative redistributions of capital into areas that some decision making body deems worthy - but which may have no bearing at…

>No overhead needed.

Sales, marketing, payment systems, and invoicing are plenty of overhead.

>This is just software, it's not rocket science, there's likely a way to just have people pay for it without too much overhead.

Sure. People are doing it. Red Hat, Canonical, Continuum, Igalia, and Mozilla are all organizations that pay for developers to work on open source. I would guess OP could look at NumFOCUS or get a job at Continuum Analytics if they want to help move Matlab developers into the open source world.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#363

Post by twakefield »

sandGorgon wrote: post #252
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?

+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/

Humble Bundle does this for indie games and other digital goods. I'm guessing they've thought about doing something similar for software like you mention but decided not to for some reason. It would be interesting to know why.

Perhaps the model needs support / services included.

Edit: or perhaps humble bundle is just more oriented to consumer goods.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#364

Post by ghaff »

scrollaway wrote: post #251
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,…

>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.

That's true and I'll argue that's a feature not a bug.

It's also by design. The OSI specifically does not allow "for educational use only" and other types of usage discrimination. "The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research."

IMO, this was one of the things that open source software licensing got right. Non-commercial licensing of open source is intuitively appealing and is also a great way to not get software adopted.

You're correct that CC, by contrast, does have an NC clause as an option. Even leaving aside philosophical points, I hold that this is a not a good license variant. Just about anything that isn't a trivial use has some commercial element to it. And what I might rationalize as non-commercial may well be different from what the copyright holder considers non-commercial.

It's probably telling that CC has been kicking around the NC problem for something like a decade at this point and AFAIK is no closer to putting a stake in the ground now than they were then.

See also: https://www.cnet.com/news/does-the-noncommercial-creative-co...

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#365

Post by jlg23 »

radarsat1 wrote: post #319
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 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…

> why would contributor contribute if they don't get a cut?

I can only speak for me: Because I did not pay anything for the foundation I built on. If someone comes and asks for a cut (and I had this more than once), I give it to them: A fair share for their 3-line patch to a million LOC codebase, minus my fee for reviewing, for tutoring and for project management. Unfortunately, so far, nobody paid after I sent my invoice :(

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#366

Post by jordigh »

radarsat1 wrote: post #319
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 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 something like run a small business or just help us figure out how to sell those useless stooge licenses I keep hearing companies want to buy instead of sending donations.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#367

Post by wenc »

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…

You make a good point. MATLAB, rightly or wrongly, has become a signal for engineering computation skillset on resumes.

That said, the world has become more accommodating in other ways. Python and R are now more well-accepted signals for data skillset than say, SAS. (exceptions: finance, pharma)

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#368

Post by edblarney »

fnord123 wrote: post #362
edblarney wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why couldn't there be an umbrella organization (not gov't) that accepts donations on behalf of the community" Why would you do that? Why not just have people pay for it? No overhead needed. "But there is a good model that is already working in other fields - the grant process" 'Grants' are speculative redistributions of capital into areas that some decision making body deems worthy - but which may have no bearing at…

>No overhead needed. Sales, marketing, payment systems, and invoicing are plenty of overhead. >This is just software, it's not rocket science, there's likely a way to just have people pay for it without too much overhead. Sure. People are doing it. Red Hat, Canonical, Continuum, Igalia, and Mozilla are all organizations that pay for developers to work on open source. I would guess OP could look at NumFOCUS or get a j…

There's no need for a sales and marketing team for a very well established and entrenched product.

He could make something very easily himself, 1-click to $X a month for some bit of software or service.

In fact, if he did it properly, he could be wealthy, or chose to hire a bunch of people to make his software even better.

Mozilla is a great org, but I'm not sure if they are the best example as I believe they depend on the benevolence (or strategic foresight) of entities like Google etc.

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