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Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

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Re: Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

#71

Post by kgwgk »

jordigh wrote: post #59
mattkrause wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At what point did Chambers became involved in R?

Re: Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

#72

Post by dagw »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #40
santaclaus wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google hires devs to develop similar libraries... to power their machine learning efforts. There is tons of numerical work in finance, too. I don't think the money is to be made by selling copies of a Matlab-like piece of software, but in the application of the tools.

But you have to run through their interview gauntlet.

Even if you get head hunted?

Re: Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

#73

Post by wodenokoto »

The "Every successful science library has the ashes of an academic career in the making" quote has been mentioned several times in the comments, so I thought I would give a plea to everybody who works in academia to help the people who build the foundational tools of your research by citing them in your papers:

https://www.scipy.org/citing.html

Re: Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

#75

Post by Certhas »

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.

Why should you need a business model? You should get a grant and then a tenured position at a publicly funded institute for providing a massive public good to the science community. Unfortunately the science community as it currently is, isn't designed to do that. Luckily there is hope for change in the future.

Re: Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

#76

Post by porker »

travisoliphant wrote: post #62
jordigh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I believe it is true that you can make more money selling non-free software (some of the profits from which should always be used to make free software). You can generate money only through free software, however. Here are three approaches I have found: 1) Consult on projects that use the free software and use some of the profits to support that free software, 2) Sell enterprise-grade support on the free software to…

In 2006 you sold documentation for NumPy [0] - how did that work out?

0. http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/courses/nlp/Software/NumPyBook...

Re: Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

#77

Post by torrent-of-ions »

wodenokoto wrote: post #73

The "Every successful science library has the ashes of an academic career in the making" quote has been mentioned several times in the comments, so I thought I would give a plea to everybody who works in academia to help the people who build the foundational tools of your research by citing them in your papers: https://www.scipy.org/citing.html

Sad to say that I haven't cited these in papers that I've published so far. Much software is taken for granted, especially libraries. I don't often see papers mention SciPy specifically let alone add a citation. The author of GNU Parallel resorted to a message on stderr asking academics to cite it.

But this isn't even the whole story. As we all know, designing and implementing a program or library is often just the first step. Someone then has to maintain that code. There is absolutely no incentive for anyone to maintain these. Institutions will fund new software because they expect a paper to be published about it. But nobody is paying anyone to maintain this stuff.

Re: Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

#78

Post by abousara »

Each country have its own taxes to sustain fundamentals, same thing must apply in software industry. Software engineers might be paid +100k$ while developing over open source languages/frameworks or libraries. That's is not fair, it is like riding a starving horse.

A French point of view (after all, France invented VAT...) would suggest to introduce a taxe on software engineers salaries (1% ?) and redistribute this fund on most used languages/frameworks/libraries and use a part to sustain a new projects.

Re: Why Is NumPy Only Now Getting Funded?

#79

Post by adrianN »

abousara wrote: post #78

Each country have its own taxes to sustain fundamentals, same thing must apply in software industry. Software engineers might be paid +100k$ while developing over open source languages/frameworks or libraries. That's is not fair, it is like riding a starving horse. A French point of view (after all, France invented VAT...) would suggest to introduce a taxe on software engineers salaries (1% ?) and redistribute this f…

How about instead of taxing the workers we tax the companies that profit from open source efforts.
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