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Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

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Re: Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

#51

Post by jordigh »

travisoliphant wrote: post #45

Original NumPy author here. I have a lot to say on this topic, given that it has literally consumed my life over the past 20 years. You can go here for some thoughts about some of this: http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.com/ There are several articles there that relate but in particular http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.com/2012/10/continuum-and... and http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.com/2017/02/numfocus-past...…

Hey, Travis, one question: have you managed to avoid selling non-free software? Everyone seems to think that eventually the way to sell free software is to sell some secret sauce on the side. Is this something you have completely eschewed?

I ask because for Octave this is a non-negotiable requirement. Partly because of the GPL, but mostly because we really do believe that the whole point of Octave is to get away from non-free software, as a matter of principle -- if you want non-free software, there's already a Matlab. Is there any way to generate enough money without a EULA?

Re: Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

#52

Post by noobermin »

jordigh wrote: post #48
jacobolus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Octave’s “business model” is “give away for free an inferior clone of a commercial product”. Why is anyone surprised that that isn’t lucrative? Anyone who has the money to spend on Octave is likely to just pay for Matlab. The defining feature of Octave users is that they want to use Matlab’s library ecosystem but they’re too cheap or broke to pay for a copy of Matlab.

Because Matlab is expensive. Very expensive. Especially if you want to run it on servers or clusters, which is something people want to do. We're talking a single company paying millions of dollars per year for Matlab licenses, versus paying thousands for Octave (this does happen, and some companies do pay for Octave, but very few). My last job consisted in fixing Octave enough to be able to run some classifiers in s…

What exclusive features are there? I'm interested.

Re: Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

#53

Post by Q6T46nT668w6i3m »

I believe I’m one of (or near) the “top 30” contributors (I’ve made substantial contributions to all of the aforementioned packages), and I’m funded to write scientific software. I’m extremely fortunate. Unfortunately, like so many things, I suspect it has everything to do with pedigree (e.g. my lab, my institution, my peers, etc.) rather than my (or my coworkers) exact contributions. In fact, I don’t know if any of my lab’s grants has ever explicitly mentioned our contributions to one of the discussed packages. However, this could change. I’m extremely encouraged, for example, by the comments from new institutions like OpenAI or the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative about the necessity of funding software.

Re: Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

#55

Post by flyovercow »

santaclaus wrote: post #32
webmaven wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fruit company (and really all of AFGAM and much of the rest of the industry) is biased toward hiring recent grads or folks who have a clear record of steadily increasing responsibility, which disadvantages those who have followed a more... eclectic path, as well as those who have had major dislocations of some sort derail their career. And almost by definition, "those 30 guys" building and maintaining a library w…

They seem more likely than others -- see the recent Homebrew author grousing about getting rejected by Google, only to land at Apple, for instance.

He left apple. He didn't fit in. There's an interview about it on a podcast

Re: Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

#57

Post by jordigh »

noobermin wrote: post #52
jordigh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Matlab is expensive. Very expensive. Especially if you want to run it on servers or clusters, which is something people want to do. We're talking a single company paying millions of dollars per year for Matlab licenses, versus paying thousands for Octave (this does happen, and some companies do pay for Octave, but very few). My last job consisted in fixing Octave enough to be able to run some classifiers in s…

What exclusive features are there? I'm interested.

It's really nothing major, but it's the small little cherries on top:

http://wiki.octave.org/FAQ#What_features_are_unique_to_Octav...

It's a bit of a problem to innovate too much with Octave, because Matlab may decide to implement a feature we did first, but they'll do it slightly differently, forcing us to redo our work to match theirs.

Re: Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

#58

Post by mattkrause »

jacobolus wrote: post #43
jordigh wrote: post #9

Also a problem for Octave. Remember this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575 It also stings a little when people say that it's completely obsolete because Matlab itself is "legacy" and we should all be abandoning the language, Octave included... and yet, even though I like numpy and Python and matplotlib and Julia and R, I still find myself reaching for Octave whenever I need a quick visualisation of some…

Octave’s “business model” is “give away for free an inferior clone of a commercial product”. Why is anyone surprised that that isn’t lucrative? Anyone who has the money to spend on Octave is likely to just pay for Matlab. The defining feature of Octave users is that they want to use Matlab’s library ecosystem but they’re too cheap or broke to pay for a copy of Matlab.

On the other hand, one of the other major data analysis platforms went the other way: R is a free implementation of S language. TIBCO still sells S-PLUS, but my impression is that R is much, much more popular.

My impression is that Octave always lags a little behind Matlab, both in terms of features and performance, since the matlab language is essentially whatever The Mathworks says it is. R and S-PLUS both have a somewhat formal definition in the form of books and articles, which might help keep them in sync.

Re: Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

#59

Post by jordigh »

mattkrause wrote: post #58
jacobolus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Octave’s “business model” is “give away for free an inferior clone of a commercial product”. Why is anyone surprised that that isn’t lucrative? Anyone who has the money to spend on Octave is likely to just pay for Matlab. The defining feature of Octave users is that they want to use Matlab’s library ecosystem but they’re too cheap or broke to pay for a copy of Matlab.

On the other hand, one of the other major data analysis platforms went the other way: R is a free implementation of S language. TIBCO still sells S-PLUS, but my impression is that R is much, much more popular. My impression is that Octave always lags a little behind Matlab, both in terms of features and performance, since the matlab language is essentially whatever The Mathworks says it is. R and S-PLUS both have a s…

R's and Octave's story is very different. Essentially one of the key originators of S, John Chambers, started to work on R. That would be like Cleve Moler being a core Octave contributor.

Re: Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

#60

Post by [deleted] »

jordigh wrote: post #48
jacobolus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Octave’s “business model” is “give away for free an inferior clone of a commercial product”. Why is anyone surprised that that isn’t lucrative? Anyone who has the money to spend on Octave is likely to just pay for Matlab. The defining feature of Octave users is that they want to use Matlab’s library ecosystem but they’re too cheap or broke to pay for a copy of Matlab.

Because Matlab is expensive. Very expensive. Especially if you want to run it on servers or clusters, which is something people want to do. We're talking a single company paying millions of dollars per year for Matlab licenses, versus paying thousands for Octave (this does happen, and some companies do pay for Octave, but very few). My last job consisted in fixing Octave enough to be able to run some classifiers in s…

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