51 ms·

Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

1332 points by dhuramas 10y ago

dhuramas 10y ago
If you think GNU Octave has made a difference in your life or other's, please take a moment to continue funding his efforts. http://jweaton.org/?page_id=48 http://jweaton.org/?page_id=48
- vmarsy 10y ago
  you can also donate via the Free software foundation, I'm not sure what the author prefers, but the FSF donation can most likely be matched 100% if your company participates in a matching program. Hopefully, adding a "for 'GNU Octave' project" note should be enough.
  - davexunit 10y ago
    There's a specific donation page for Octave. https://my.fsf.org/donate/working-together/octave https://my.fsf.org/donate/working-together/octave Using the regular donation page with a note will just complicate the lives of the FSF staff.
    - dopeboy 10y ago
      Thanks for posting this link davexunit. Just donated $100. I used Octave in undergrad for some engineering classes. This doesn't solve the long term problem for the author but I hope it provides some temporary relief.
mooreds 10y ago
For those of us not in the know, GNU Octave is, according to Wikipedia, "software featuring a high-level programming language, primarily intended for numerical computations."
- iamed2 10y ago
  More specifically, it's designed to support as much as possible of MATLAB's syntax to provide an open-source alternative to MATLAB.
  - mlvljr 10y ago
    Which it failed to do last time I checked. Sadly.
rdstone2 10y ago
This is worth while. Wish I could give more.
petercooper 10y ago
At the risk of comparing apples to boulder sized oranges, it's a shame considering Wolfram supports hundreds of employees off of Mathematica alone (something that wows my mind - in a good way - every time I'm reminded of it). I hope this drive works but also the long term prospects.
n00b101 10y ago
Meanwhile, MathWorks annual revenue is over $800 million.
- pm90 10y ago
  Honest question: what exactly do you hope to put light on with that comparison? I don't think the developer in question has ever claimed that he is a fantastic businessman: quite the contrary, he is (apparently) a very talented developer who is seeking funding to continue a project which others may find useful. I understand that the current economic system in the US greatly favors forming a business around a good idea/software, but we shouldn't be closed to other models of software development as well.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    The GP probably meant that people are more than willing to pay for Matlab but they don't realize that Octave needs funding too, and possibly that if you use Octave it's probably worth around the price of a Matlab license, on average, to you.
    - myhf 10y ago
      Are there any people willing to pay for Matlab? It's usually purchased by departments, not end users.
  - n00b101 10y ago
    Octave is a clone of MATLAB, which is MathWorks' flagship product. They have identical programming languages and similar libraries. MATLAB's initial release was in 1984, and Octave's was in 1988. So there is a direct comparison in terms of product features, target market and development period. A critical difference is that one is closed-source commercial product and the other is an open source GNU project. The huge difference in success makes for an interesting comparison of these two models of software development. It reminds me of an essay by an a16z partner about "Why there will never be another Red Hat" [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-want-to-be-the-next-red-hat/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-wa...
hakcermani 10y ago
I beseech every Andrew Ngs ML course student to contribute a little. I just did.
- paintnp 10y ago
  Thanks for reminding about Andrew's course. Had to contribute after that :)
- thedevil 10y ago
  I was on the edge of donating or not donating and your comment was just the tiny push that got me to give a little money. Peer pressure works, apparently, at least sometimes.
- paintnp 10y ago
  Thanks for reminding about Andrew's course. Had to contribute after that :)
- wavewash 10y ago
  This. I'm taking the class now. Octave is invaluable and I wouldn't be able to complete the course without it. I've donated and agree that anyone that takes the course to contribute too.
supahfly_remix 10y ago
It seems that octave has been overtaken (in mindshare) by python/numpy. Why is that the case?
- xapata 10y ago
  Python is general-purpose and more people use it. There are many reasons, but the preferential attachment model is sufficient to explain your observations, in this comparison.
- thanatropism 10y ago
  The short answer is "scikit-learn".
  - supahfly_remix 10y ago
    Can you please give the longer answer? I don't understand what you mean. What does scikit-learn have that octave doesn't? (Asking out of ignorance)
    - CydeWeys 10y ago
      It's commonly featured in machine learning MOOCs. Sometimes things win mindshare for reasons other than feature sets.
  - hprotagonist 10y ago
    and/or pandas, opencv, seaborn, bokeh. or R.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  Octave is basically a not-as-good-but-free version of matlab, and matlab is an abomination. See forex: http://archive.is/tCo6B http://archive.is/tCo6B
- Jach 10y ago
  Did Octave ever have a larger mindshare? It always seemed like the cheapskate's Matlab substitute, but if you know enough Matlab where you might consider a substitute, you probably have a Matlab license already. (Or like me a need to run on an embedded Linux while you work on a python port + a distaste for proprietary software...) Anyway, my thought on why numpy seems more widespread is simple: efficiency. Even Matlab code gets rewritten if it needs to be used for something intense, and Matlab has many more optimizations than Octave to get away with sloppy coding. Python+numpy is pretty easy even for a non-programmer to write (at least compared to C++ or whatever a DSP wants you to use) and even sloppily done is generally fast, plus it has a great and large community. But both Matlab and Octave are great (at least if you use octave-forge) for prototyping and doing a lot of domain specific things python/numpy/scipy don't support out of the box. Matlab especially has a lot of neat GUI helper tools. Meanwhile R is over in its own world where if you're doing anything in that domain it's a questionable choice not to take advantage.
bradneuberg 10y ago
Just donated 25 bucks. Octave is a fabulous tool.
yazaddaruvala 10y ago
This is not a scalable model of software funding. People may send you money today, because its on their minds, but bills will have to be paid again next month, and next year. Please get yourself, a Patreon account, or something similar. Meanwhile, I'm sure MathWorks is looking for people with exactly your domain knowledge[0]. https://www.mathworks.com/company/jobs/opportunities/?s_tid=hp_ff_a_careers https://www.mathworks.com/company/jobs/opportunities/?s_tid=...
- pinewurst 10y ago
  Working there, though, might preclude further work on Octave.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    I'm guessing that when you're the BDFL of Octave you can negotiate a compromise.
    - jlarocco 10y ago
      No way. I don't know what the relationship between MathWorks and Octave is, but probably the last thing MathWorks wants to do is give the creator their biggest competitor access to their trade secrets and proprietary information.
      - gech 10y ago
        Maybe as humans we should be thinking bigger than things like secrets
        arjie 10y ago
        Well, maybe if you convince the MathWorks guys of that they'll hire this dude, but otherwise he's not going to get to do both things.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
vanattab 10y ago
I have not tried the octave GUI in a couple of years but back then it was awful. In my opinion this has always been octaves biggest weakness. If they would fix this I am sure they gain significantly marketshare from matlab.
- viraptor 10y ago
  > back then it was awful I think you'll have to expand on that. "awful" is neither useful nor constructive. Do you mean compatibility, interface, documentation, something else?
- rhodysurf 10y ago
  In 4.0 it looks waaayyyyyyy better. Much more modern and more like Matlab.
anigbrowl 10y ago
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 economic security is inefficient, demoralizing, and unreliable. I think services like Patreon etc. are quite worthy but they're also dysfunctional. Nobody has solved the micro-payment problem yet and it seems like people have just given up trying. In a saner world this person would be rewarded for the enormous technical contribution with a reliable pension of some sort to remove the distraction of financial anxiety.
- was_boring 10y ago
  > Nobody has solved the micro-payment problem yet what is this problem?
  - kelnos 10y ago
    I assume the parent is referring to the problem where it's prohibitively expensive (from a payment processing perspective) to receive lots of small, sub-dollar payments. Also there's a lot of friction if you're relying on your users to pull out their credit card info for such a small amount.
    - viraptor 10y ago
      That part has been fixed by https://flattr.com/ https://flattr.com/ You either prepay or setup a periodic payment and then just click the flattr badges whenever you want. They get funded from your flattr pool. No need for the card every time. Unfortunately flattr didn't really take off.
      - harry8 10y ago
        > Unfortunately flattr didn't really take off. So it is still not fixed.
ireadzalot 10y ago
Just donated to the J W. Eaton Consulting. Thank you for octave. I used it throughout the Andrew Ng's ML course.
bordercases 10y ago
Can you get academia to give you funding to continue the project? It's a common model in the bioinformatics world.
- jordigh 10y ago
  He used to have exactly that, but his academic position ended 8 years ago.
vcistan-inmate 10y ago
I don't understand how YC can fund non-profits like VotePlz and the ACLU while not funding stuff like this. All of the startups funded by VCs use free software, often exclusively, but these VCs continue to refuse to adequately fund its development. Marc Andreessen even publicly boasted about how much OSS his companies use[1], which he of course doesn't pay for. I also shudder to think of how Eaton will fare on the job market should he actually be forced to seek regular employment. Will he be whiteboarded? Will his work on Octave--which by all rights should be able to serve as a strong-enough resume by itself to justify his hiring--even be looked at by potential employers? And what about his age? 25 years on Octave could mean he's pushing 50. I could easily see him getting a "no hire" from plenty of trendy tech companies. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/boxnet-2011-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/boxnet-2011-9
- sotojuan 10y ago
  You said it yourself—Octave isn't trendy or cool.
  - jhbadger 10y ago
    The problem is I think Octave missed its window. 20 years ago when I was in grad school, everybody was using Matlab and a competitive open source version would have been a killer app. I looked into Octave at the time, but it was basically a toy at that point. I looked into it recently, and it really has come a long way, and even has an official GUI similar to Matlab's, but these days Matlab is kind of fading out and R is what everybody seems to be using.
    - viraptor 10y ago
      I did my uni ~10 years ago and I made a point of using Octave when everyone else was using Matlab. It worked just great for all the ODE and statistics exercises. Nobody else used it though.
    - photojosh 10y ago
      And 10 years ago when I was in grad school (dropped out though), Python was on the rise with numpy and matplotlib. Coming from a programming background, it was an easy choice and I'm still using those today. They've got more usable for people with less programming experience with Jupyter notebooks etc. Was briefly tempted by Octave, but it just didn't happen.
samfisher83 10y ago
Why can't a company like google just hire and let him work octave like 20% of the time. They can afford it.
- mhermher 10y ago
  Better yet, some consortium of universities. I've found that Matlab usage is probably like >90% academics. Wouldn't paying for contributions to Octave devs not save them money versus Matlab licenses?
  - stephencanon 10y ago
    Academic Matlab licenses are cheap. Hook 'em young, and they pay once they're out.
- nileshtrivedi 10y ago
  So Google's competitors benefit at Google's expense? This is a classical case of tragedy of the commons.
saganus 10y ago
Sometimes I dream that if I ever become very wealthy (either because of something I created or because I won the lottery) I would go around and donate some nice money to these under-appreciated developers/organizations/projects. I mean, if I had billions, wouldn't it be feasible to spend say 1M or even 0.5M to say, 100 projects? 200 maybe? Does this not happen or do we just not hear about it if it ever happens?
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Most people would rather save 1,000 people from Malaria in Africa than give 1 white college educated man living in one of the richest counties on earth a year's salary to write code from his home office. (I am sure it happens, but I am sure that it is pretty low on the donation list)
  - ktta 10y ago
    If anyone's interested, here's a good article about how one billionaire decided to spend his money - on better science. https://www.wired.com/2017/01/john-arnold-waging-war-on-bad-science/ https://www.wired.com/2017/01/john-arnold-waging-war-on-bad-...
  - bzbarsky 10y ago
    For what it's worth, http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/insecticide-treated-nets#HowcosteffectiveisLLINdistribution http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/ins... estimates about $3000 per life saved (which I will grant is not the same thing as "malaria case prevented"). So a year's salary for a good developer would be on the order of 30-150 lives saved, depending on market and definition of "good"... Agreed with your overall point, though.
    - dragandj 10y ago
      The cost of one Matlab license could save a human life, by such accounting.
      - 10y ago
viraptor 10y ago
Does anyone know if the paypal page is doing it right? Usually I see something about donation with other projects. This one says "Purchase details" and has quantity. I'd hate for it to be closed down for not complying with some paypal rules.
crb002 10y ago
I'd apply to Mathworks as BDFL of Octave and work on Matlab support for open source packages. So many areas to work on. Integrating D3.js, integrating with Python machine learning/dataframe libraries, FPGAs, SMT solvers like Z3 and CVC4, ...
- crb002 10y ago
  Also ask Wolfram for some funding. They would love to gobble Mathworks clients and could do so with better Octave integration.
- jordigh 10y ago
  This wouldn't work. The Mathworks has never been friendly to us. Working for the Mathworks would mean the death of Octave, and I know jwe doesn't want Octave to die.
david38 10y ago
I'm sure he can a job at Google.
dostoevsky 10y ago
As a soon-to-be engineering graduate, I am very thankful for Octave. I've used it (instead of MATLAB) for projects involving numerical methods, control systems, image processing, and all kinds of data manipulation. While it may not be as powerful as MATLAB for certain use cases, it is an amazing piece of software.
williamstein 10y ago
I added a slide about this to the talk I'm giving tomorrow on funding for open source math software at University of Rochester: http://wstein.org/talks/2017-02-09-wing-sage/slides.pdf http://wstein.org/talks/2017-02-09-wing-sage/slides.pdf
- jordigh 10y ago
  Thanks, Will. I hope things are working out for you too.
  - williamstein 10y ago
    Thanks - definitely not yet, though I still have hope and feedback from customers is very good.
sandGorgon 10y ago
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 Pro and their experience making 80k USD per month. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12925449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12925449 At first I built Sidekiq as an LGPL project and sold commercial licenses for $50. Revenue was laughably small, but the response I got was encouraging: people told me they were saving $thousands/mo over previous solutions and wanted to buy the license just to give me something as thanks. Octave currently offers support packages for which you have to write in to the maintainer and have an email discussion. Compare that with Sidekiq : http://sidekiq.org/products/pro http://sidekiq.org/products/pro Its one of the best designed gratitude-ware page...even works amazingly well on a mobile phone. We personally also buy pfsense licenses https://www.pfsense.org/our-services/gold-membership.html https://www.pfsense.org/our-services/gold-membership.html TL;Dr Donations wont work. Engineers cant give an excuse to corporate accounting. Make a pro subscription with ANY "pro level" feature. I can get my accounting to sign off. And no "contact us to find out about support contract".
- vitro 10y ago
  That seems like a good idea of a third party service - taking care of Pro subscriptions and invoicing for OSS projects.
- chillingeffect 10y ago
  Under rated post here. The key is to build a bigger solution around Octave, including say database or ML or simulation. A billable piece of IP. And streamline the surrounding commerce. ALso key is to locate Octave within the solution space, e.g. Startups who can't afford matlab. High schools. A formal online course. Makerspaces. Job seekers wanting to work with matlab.
- Anechoic 10y ago
  I'll add my voice as someone that would gladly pay $100/year for a few no-support type "licenses" (and I just made a long overdue donation to jwe). That said, I would understand if he didn't want to try an licensing like that for fear of angering The Mathworks.
plinkplonk 10y ago
You might want to check with the Julia folks. They now have a company (Julia Computing) backing the project. I don't know if they are hiring right now, and if so, whether you'd be a good fit, but it couldn't hurt to ask. Might be a better alternative to working for MathWorks! Julia is an open source project with many brilliant developers and mathematicians contributing. http://juliacomputing.com/ http://juliacomputing.com/ I don't see a 'jobs' page, but CEO Viral Shah (and everyone else, but Viral is who I know) is on twitter, and is a great guy. https://twitter.com/Viral_B_Shah https://twitter.com/Viral_B_Shah
- spangry 10y ago
  This is great (and practical) advice. I hope the Octave BDFL reads it. Continuum Analytics might be another good fit, given a decent amount of ML work coming out of academia is in the form of a matlab file. I'm not sure if by 'partner' they mean 'people we give money/people who give us money', but it costs nothing to ask: https://www.continuum.io/partners https://www.continuum.io/partners
hughw 10y ago
While recruiting at UT Austin petroleum engineering school recently, I was impressed how embedded Matlab has become there. The students use Matlab for big semester projects and everyday scratchpad computation. I believe it's a required skill. I don't know the licensing arrangement Mathworks made with them. It's common for software companies to donate licenses to engineering and science departments. It's a loss leader, and presumably lots of the students will pull Matlab licenses into their employers later. But Matlab is so ubiquitous there, and so integrated into the curriculum, it could be that money did change hands. I wonder if there's an opening along those line for a revenue stream for Octave?
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  Iirc student licenses are ~$100, and full licenses are ~$2500, with $1000-$1500 for additional libraries. I wonder if schools pay $0, $100, or somewhere around $300-$500.
  - BeetleB 10y ago
    My university had only student licenses.
brilliantcode 10y ago
> I would love to continue as the Octave BDFL but I also need to find a way to pay the bills. Breaks my heart to see such devoted developers having so much trouble paying bills for the work they've done. I truly believe that this problem can be solved-by crowdfunding open source developments that rivals commercial status quo, we can decouple ourselves from restrictive licensing structures while paying people's bills for those who contribute to the development. Imagine if Octave just got $3000 USD / month, that should help with basic costs of living (not knowing where the original author is) and also incentivize continued development-25 years of unpaid work is a tragedy. I still have not figured out all angles but this is my dream. To help open source developers get paid and the work that becomes BSD or MIT licensed will offer a strong alternative to commercial softwares. I'm wondering if anybody else shares similar vision, please subscribe at http://letsopensource.com http://letsopensource.com or feel free to reach out at my email in my profile.
- noufalibrahim 10y ago
  I wonder if it's because the time investment demanded of the BDFL is so high. If there were more people and each put in smaller amounts of their time to work on the project, then it would be possible to sustain it without having to depend on the charity of users. I get the feeling that projects like Python operate like this but I have no data to back my claim.
  - brilliantcode 10y ago
    Yes sort of like how Patreon crowdfunds independent youtube channels to create the content the backers want to see. I just figured out what BDFL meant :)
- rabidrat 10y ago
  The "Subscribe to Updates" button on that page doesn't work. Also, above the "Full Name" field, it says "invalid".
  - brilliantcode 10y ago
sytelus 10y ago
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. - Create an edition like Octave Gold for $5 which has zero feature differences but has some cool logo or chrome or fun cosmetic thing. You will be surprised how many people want to pay for it.
- yumaikas 10y ago
  I like the idea of Octave Gold. I would totally buy something like that.
- palerdot 10y ago
  There a lot of variations of octave gold which can be applied to the product. I have not used octave and don't know whether the following applies to it - like a "tip from the author" in the GUI, custom themes etc.
tempire 10y ago
Contribution made. Octave is on point, and easily accessible for those wanting to learn Matlab-like syntax without having to mortgage their homes.
fooledrand 10y ago
So xoctave[1] is not commercial version of octave? [1] http://xoctave.com/blog/ http://xoctave.com/blog/
- tavert 10y ago
  Looks like that was one of the several third-party Octave GUI projects that predated the incorporation of an official GUI upstream in version 3.8 or 4.0 of Octave.
antirez 10y ago
Is it just my feeling/bias or projects under the GNU umbrella suffer the problem of not putting the developers at the center of the project enough? One of the things you should get back from doing something like Octave, is to be recognized at least in certain parts of the software community. When an OSS project is a GNU project maybe it is less likely to get the deserved credits, that later may lead to positions, donations, or whatever, compared to having a project on Github, regularly writing to a blog, and so forth. So, without trying to ignore the fundamental problem of a lot of work important for the society that does not compensates the developers as it should, maybe OSS developers need to get smart and try to put themselves at the center of their projects in order to get the visibility that later may save their careers.
- anewhnaccount 10y ago
  I agree that being under the GNU isn't necessarily good for projects. Look at https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=octave https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=octave for example. Many of these patches have in fact been merged, but nobody really knows how to use this bug tracker. Actually editing the wiki requires asking on IRC. See here: https://octave.sourceforge.io/ https://octave.sourceforge.io/ Octave should have a steady stream of students who have been made to use Matlab trying to use it instead. If the barriers were lower these people might get hooked on contributing. As it is, I imagine they take one look and think "old and busted". I don't think it's necessary to use Github, but the development tools should be something people can use frictionlessly, which isn't the case now.
jgord 10y ago
Perhaps offer tiered packages of sponsorship for companies to advertise at OctaveConf ? eg. A special thankyou to our Gold sponsor XYZ Corp who donated 10k to support Octave core developers and this conference. etc.
JoelJacobson 10y ago
$5,000 (will be) donated. Tried to use PayPal. A Top Up to my PayPal account via Instant Bank Transfer worked fine, but when I tried to use the money by making a transfer to The Octave Guy, PayPal said my account had been frozen :-( I have emailed the author and requested bank details in order to make a regular bank transfer instead.
- zapu 10y ago
  I think you will only need to provide additional verification for PayPal and you'll be good to go. They need to do it because of anti money laundering laws - at least here in Europe, but it's probably similar in US.
- mrwilhelm 10y ago
  When they catch big amount of money transfer for new accounts, they disable in order to secure it. With some verification -probably id, pasaport - they will send the money eventually. So I suggest to verify Paypal account which will be faster probably take a day.
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  WOW!
- jordigh 10y ago
  Holy shit. You really did do it. Wow, thanks!
geff82 10y ago
I like Octave so I just sent some bucks. Doesn't hurt me, but helps the cause.
tigroferoce 10y ago
I've never used so much octave (except for a couple of exams at university), but 25 years of life and work devoted to the community deserves my 10$. Thank you for all the work and good luck!
andyjohnson0 10y ago
It is interesting to contrast this with esr's recent announcement "In which, alas, I must rattle a tin cup" [1]. [1] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7348#more-7348 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7348#more-7348
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- danaliv 10y ago
  I was tempted to post the same thing. ESR points fingers, talks about how bloody important he is, and scoffs at the idea of getting a job like the rest of us. JWE faces facts, asks people to make their own judgment, and talks of getting a job in a tone that isn't snobbish.
EdiX 10y ago
Free startup idea: Patreon for Open Source * Users signs up to OSPatreon, downloads OSPatreon app that creates ospatreon directory in $HOME/.local/share/ or other operating system appropriate location, then creates a cronjob (or whatever) to rerun after one month * Open Source projects that want in add a snippet of code that, when the application closes, writes the amount of time the application ran to $HOME/.local/share/ospatreon/ * At the end of the month the OSPatreon window pops up, shows the user a list of ospatreon projects the user has used, sorted by decreasing total time, lets user select how much to donate and the share each application gets (default: proportional to time the app was used) * You collect money from the user, pocket some percentage, distribute the rest to OS projects. Startup name: Fosstreon.
- gregwebs 10y ago
  This is a good idea. However, I think it is problematic that most open source usage is in the form of libraries. If a GUI leverages amazing open-source libraries, only the GUI author would be paid. Additionally, many closed source (GUI or not) projects leverage many open-source libraries.
  - palerdot 10y ago
    It can be solved with the main app listing its oss dependencies - similar to dependencies in node package.json . the amount to be paid to the main project gets split based on the dependencies and weightage specified.
Chobicus 10y ago
Made a small donation since I've used it in Andrew Ng's ML class
vijayr 10y ago
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 for all of humanity.
- jkaunisv1 10y ago
  I'm very hopeful that YC's city-building efforts (if they come to fruition) will include something like this. And it's something I plan to do when I get land in the next decade (not the food/healthcare part but at least a place to stay which IMO is the biggest expense).
- splitbrain 10y ago
  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.
  - vijayr 10y ago
    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
- tluyben2 10y ago
  I rather just get paid to buy those things at home and work from there on OSS projects. Everyone has a different taste, but why not just sponsor projects with money so the author(s) can buy food/stay/healthcare themselves? Or at least fund towards that?
amelius 10y ago
It's a sad truth that it is really difficult to make decent money writing scientific software.
superquest 10y ago
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 such a bill if nearly all the money went straight to the developer, I could cap my contributions, and it was extremely easy to opt-in. Ideally the package manager would read some dotfile or ask me! The problem with projects like Bountysource is that 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. Has anything like this been attempted? Edit: clarifications ...
- whit537 10y ago
  > 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/ 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 https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/pull/4305
hebbarp 10y ago
Yes, Octave the saviour. Sad that such projects aren't supported or there is no foundation that can come forward to help the BDFL. Made my contribution, hope it adds to the drop in the ocean. All the best.
johnmarcus 10y ago
Octave seems to have some great mentions on indeed.com. https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=octave&l= https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=octave&l= Not sure if any of those jobs are near you, but give it a look. The position titles might help you expand your search in your local area.
stevehiehn 10y ago
Jeez, This is heart breaking.
shitgoose 10y ago
this is sad. I just rediscovered octave not long ago. I have been using R, but was never comfortable with it - yukky syntax, clunky RStudio. octave has clean and solid UI, nice syntax that sticks and reasonable base packages. I wish you guys could develop a practice around octave, selling services, while keeping base product free.
HNLogInShit 10y ago
Too bad it doesn't say what Octave is.
kazinator 10y ago
Most people with an open source side project P will never be in the position of "oh, I need money; I guess I will have to find a non-P job". That's the norm.
Mikeb85 10y ago
Then make a website, register a company, and make it official. Maybe take a page from RStudio's model and adapt an IDE to use Octave. Offer a product, any product, and people will buy it. I have no doubt people will pay for the author to continue to develop Octave, but simply sending money to a PayPal account isn't something most people are comfortable with. Plus how do you invoice that?
baki 10y ago
Hmmm...Decrypt it with waterboarding!
DeAndre222 10y ago
Do you need to keep an eye on your spouse by gaining access to their emails? As a parent do you want to know what your kids do on a daily basis on social networks ( This includes facebook, twitter , instagram, whatsapp, WeChat and others to make sure theyre not getting into trouble? Whatever it is, Ranging from transfers, Criminal records, DMV, Taxes, Credit Score). No worries he can get the job done.He is a professional hacker with 10 Years+ experience.Contact him at ecodatasolution@dr.com

1332 points by dhuramas 10y ago

If you think GNU Octave has made a difference in your life or other's, please take a moment to continue funding his efforts. http://jweaton.org/?page_id=48 http://jweaton.org/?page_id=48

vmarsy 10y ago
you can also donate via the Free software foundation, I'm not sure what the author prefers, but the FSF donation can most likely be matched 100% if your company participates in a matching program. Hopefully, adding a "for 'GNU Octave' project" note should be enough.
- davexunit 10y ago
  There's a specific donation page for Octave. https://my.fsf.org/donate/working-together/octave https://my.fsf.org/donate/working-together/octave Using the regular donation page with a note will just complicate the lives of the FSF staff.
  - dopeboy 10y ago
    Thanks for posting this link davexunit. Just donated $100. I used Octave in undergrad for some engineering classes. This doesn't solve the long term problem for the author but I hope it provides some temporary relief.

mooreds 10y ago

For those of us not in the know, GNU Octave is, according to Wikipedia, "software featuring a high-level programming language, primarily intended for numerical computations."

iamed2 10y ago
More specifically, it's designed to support as much as possible of MATLAB's syntax to provide an open-source alternative to MATLAB.
- mlvljr 10y ago
  Which it failed to do last time I checked. Sadly.

rdstone2 10y ago

This is worth while. Wish I could give more.

petercooper 10y ago

At the risk of comparing apples to boulder sized oranges, it's a shame considering Wolfram supports hundreds of employees off of Mathematica alone (something that wows my mind - in a good way - every time I'm reminded of it). I hope this drive works but also the long term prospects.

n00b101 10y ago

Meanwhile, MathWorks annual revenue is over $800 million.

pm90 10y ago
Honest question: what exactly do you hope to put light on with that comparison? I don't think the developer in question has ever claimed that he is a fantastic businessman: quite the contrary, he is (apparently) a very talented developer who is seeking funding to continue a project which others may find useful. I understand that the current economic system in the US greatly favors forming a business around a good idea/software, but we shouldn't be closed to other models of software development as well.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  The GP probably meant that people are more than willing to pay for Matlab but they don't realize that Octave needs funding too, and possibly that if you use Octave it's probably worth around the price of a Matlab license, on average, to you.
  - myhf 10y ago
    Are there any people willing to pay for Matlab? It's usually purchased by departments, not end users.
- n00b101 10y ago
  Octave is a clone of MATLAB, which is MathWorks' flagship product. They have identical programming languages and similar libraries. MATLAB's initial release was in 1984, and Octave's was in 1988. So there is a direct comparison in terms of product features, target market and development period. A critical difference is that one is closed-source commercial product and the other is an open source GNU project. The huge difference in success makes for an interesting comparison of these two models of software development. It reminds me of an essay by an a16z partner about "Why there will never be another Red Hat" [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-want-to-be-the-next-red-hat/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-wa...

hakcermani 10y ago

I beseech every Andrew Ngs ML course student to contribute a little. I just did.

paintnp 10y ago
Thanks for reminding about Andrew's course. Had to contribute after that :)
thedevil 10y ago
I was on the edge of donating or not donating and your comment was just the tiny push that got me to give a little money. Peer pressure works, apparently, at least sometimes.
paintnp 10y ago
Thanks for reminding about Andrew's course. Had to contribute after that :)
wavewash 10y ago
This. I'm taking the class now. Octave is invaluable and I wouldn't be able to complete the course without it. I've donated and agree that anyone that takes the course to contribute too.

supahfly_remix 10y ago

It seems that octave has been overtaken (in mindshare) by python/numpy. Why is that the case?

xapata 10y ago
Python is general-purpose and more people use it. There are many reasons, but the preferential attachment model is sufficient to explain your observations, in this comparison.
thanatropism 10y ago
The short answer is "scikit-learn".
- supahfly_remix 10y ago
  Can you please give the longer answer? I don't understand what you mean. What does scikit-learn have that octave doesn't? (Asking out of ignorance)
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    It's commonly featured in machine learning MOOCs. Sometimes things win mindshare for reasons other than feature sets.
- hprotagonist 10y ago
  and/or pandas, opencv, seaborn, bokeh. or R.
GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
Octave is basically a not-as-good-but-free version of matlab, and matlab is an abomination. See forex: http://archive.is/tCo6B http://archive.is/tCo6B
Jach 10y ago
Did Octave ever have a larger mindshare? It always seemed like the cheapskate's Matlab substitute, but if you know enough Matlab where you might consider a substitute, you probably have a Matlab license already. (Or like me a need to run on an embedded Linux while you work on a python port + a distaste for proprietary software...) Anyway, my thought on why numpy seems more widespread is simple: efficiency. Even Matlab code gets rewritten if it needs to be used for something intense, and Matlab has many more optimizations than Octave to get away with sloppy coding. Python+numpy is pretty easy even for a non-programmer to write (at least compared to C++ or whatever a DSP wants you to use) and even sloppily done is generally fast, plus it has a great and large community. But both Matlab and Octave are great (at least if you use octave-forge) for prototyping and doing a lot of domain specific things python/numpy/scipy don't support out of the box. Matlab especially has a lot of neat GUI helper tools. Meanwhile R is over in its own world where if you're doing anything in that domain it's a questionable choice not to take advantage.

bradneuberg 10y ago

Just donated 25 bucks. Octave is a fabulous tool.

yazaddaruvala 10y ago

This is not a scalable model of software funding. People may send you money today, because its on their minds, but bills will have to be paid again next month, and next year. Please get yourself, a Patreon account, or something similar. Meanwhile, I'm sure MathWorks is looking for people with exactly your domain knowledge[0]. https://www.mathworks.com/company/jobs/opportunities/?s_tid=hp_ff_a_careers https://www.mathworks.com/company/jobs/opportunities/?s_tid=...

pinewurst 10y ago
Working there, though, might preclude further work on Octave.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  I'm guessing that when you're the BDFL of Octave you can negotiate a compromise.
  - jlarocco 10y ago
    No way. I don't know what the relationship between MathWorks and Octave is, but probably the last thing MathWorks wants to do is give the creator their biggest competitor access to their trade secrets and proprietary information.
    - gech 10y ago
      Maybe as humans we should be thinking bigger than things like secrets
      - arjie 10y ago
        Well, maybe if you convince the MathWorks guys of that they'll hire this dude, but otherwise he's not going to get to do both things.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

vanattab 10y ago

I have not tried the octave GUI in a couple of years but back then it was awful. In my opinion this has always been octaves biggest weakness. If they would fix this I am sure they gain significantly marketshare from matlab.

viraptor 10y ago
> back then it was awful I think you'll have to expand on that. "awful" is neither useful nor constructive. Do you mean compatibility, interface, documentation, something else?
rhodysurf 10y ago
In 4.0 it looks waaayyyyyyy better. Much more modern and more like Matlab.

anigbrowl 10y ago

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 economic security is inefficient, demoralizing, and unreliable. I think services like Patreon etc. are quite worthy but they're also dysfunctional. Nobody has solved the micro-payment problem yet and it seems like people have just given up trying. In a saner world this person would be rewarded for the enormous technical contribution with a reliable pension of some sort to remove the distraction of financial anxiety.

was_boring 10y ago
> Nobody has solved the micro-payment problem yet what is this problem?
- kelnos 10y ago
  I assume the parent is referring to the problem where it's prohibitively expensive (from a payment processing perspective) to receive lots of small, sub-dollar payments. Also there's a lot of friction if you're relying on your users to pull out their credit card info for such a small amount.
  - viraptor 10y ago
    That part has been fixed by https://flattr.com/ https://flattr.com/ You either prepay or setup a periodic payment and then just click the flattr badges whenever you want. They get funded from your flattr pool. No need for the card every time. Unfortunately flattr didn't really take off.
    - harry8 10y ago
      > Unfortunately flattr didn't really take off. So it is still not fixed.

ireadzalot 10y ago

Just donated to the J W. Eaton Consulting. Thank you for octave. I used it throughout the Andrew Ng's ML course.

bordercases 10y ago

Can you get academia to give you funding to continue the project? It's a common model in the bioinformatics world.

jordigh 10y ago
He used to have exactly that, but his academic position ended 8 years ago.

vcistan-inmate 10y ago

I don't understand how YC can fund non-profits like VotePlz and the ACLU while not funding stuff like this. All of the startups funded by VCs use free software, often exclusively, but these VCs continue to refuse to adequately fund its development. Marc Andreessen even publicly boasted about how much OSS his companies use[1], which he of course doesn't pay for. I also shudder to think of how Eaton will fare on the job market should he actually be forced to seek regular employment. Will he be whiteboarded? Will his work on Octave--which by all rights should be able to serve as a strong-enough resume by itself to justify his hiring--even be looked at by potential employers? And what about his age? 25 years on Octave could mean he's pushing 50. I could easily see him getting a "no hire" from plenty of trendy tech companies. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/boxnet-2011-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/boxnet-2011-9

sotojuan 10y ago
You said it yourself—Octave isn't trendy or cool.
- jhbadger 10y ago
  The problem is I think Octave missed its window. 20 years ago when I was in grad school, everybody was using Matlab and a competitive open source version would have been a killer app. I looked into Octave at the time, but it was basically a toy at that point. I looked into it recently, and it really has come a long way, and even has an official GUI similar to Matlab's, but these days Matlab is kind of fading out and R is what everybody seems to be using.
  - viraptor 10y ago
    I did my uni ~10 years ago and I made a point of using Octave when everyone else was using Matlab. It worked just great for all the ODE and statistics exercises. Nobody else used it though.
  - photojosh 10y ago
    And 10 years ago when I was in grad school (dropped out though), Python was on the rise with numpy and matplotlib. Coming from a programming background, it was an easy choice and I'm still using those today. They've got more usable for people with less programming experience with Jupyter notebooks etc. Was briefly tempted by Octave, but it just didn't happen.

samfisher83 10y ago

Why can't a company like google just hire and let him work octave like 20% of the time. They can afford it.

mhermher 10y ago
Better yet, some consortium of universities. I've found that Matlab usage is probably like >90% academics. Wouldn't paying for contributions to Octave devs not save them money versus Matlab licenses?
- stephencanon 10y ago
  Academic Matlab licenses are cheap. Hook 'em young, and they pay once they're out.
nileshtrivedi 10y ago
So Google's competitors benefit at Google's expense? This is a classical case of tragedy of the commons.

saganus 10y ago

Sometimes I dream that if I ever become very wealthy (either because of something I created or because I won the lottery) I would go around and donate some nice money to these under-appreciated developers/organizations/projects. I mean, if I had billions, wouldn't it be feasible to spend say 1M or even 0.5M to say, 100 projects? 200 maybe? Does this not happen or do we just not hear about it if it ever happens?

brianwawok 10y ago
Most people would rather save 1,000 people from Malaria in Africa than give 1 white college educated man living in one of the richest counties on earth a year's salary to write code from his home office. (I am sure it happens, but I am sure that it is pretty low on the donation list)
- ktta 10y ago
  If anyone's interested, here's a good article about how one billionaire decided to spend his money - on better science. https://www.wired.com/2017/01/john-arnold-waging-war-on-bad-science/ https://www.wired.com/2017/01/john-arnold-waging-war-on-bad-...
- bzbarsky 10y ago
  For what it's worth, http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/insecticide-treated-nets#HowcosteffectiveisLLINdistribution http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/ins... estimates about $3000 per life saved (which I will grant is not the same thing as "malaria case prevented"). So a year's salary for a good developer would be on the order of 30-150 lives saved, depending on market and definition of "good"... Agreed with your overall point, though.
  - dragandj 10y ago
    The cost of one Matlab license could save a human life, by such accounting.
    - 10y ago

viraptor 10y ago

Does anyone know if the paypal page is doing it right? Usually I see something about donation with other projects. This one says "Purchase details" and has quantity. I'd hate for it to be closed down for not complying with some paypal rules.

crb002 10y ago

I'd apply to Mathworks as BDFL of Octave and work on Matlab support for open source packages. So many areas to work on. Integrating D3.js, integrating with Python machine learning/dataframe libraries, FPGAs, SMT solvers like Z3 and CVC4, ...

crb002 10y ago
Also ask Wolfram for some funding. They would love to gobble Mathworks clients and could do so with better Octave integration.
jordigh 10y ago
This wouldn't work. The Mathworks has never been friendly to us. Working for the Mathworks would mean the death of Octave, and I know jwe doesn't want Octave to die.

david38 10y ago

I'm sure he can a job at Google.

dostoevsky 10y ago

As a soon-to-be engineering graduate, I am very thankful for Octave. I've used it (instead of MATLAB) for projects involving numerical methods, control systems, image processing, and all kinds of data manipulation. While it may not be as powerful as MATLAB for certain use cases, it is an amazing piece of software.

williamstein 10y ago

I added a slide about this to the talk I'm giving tomorrow on funding for open source math software at University of Rochester: http://wstein.org/talks/2017-02-09-wing-sage/slides.pdf http://wstein.org/talks/2017-02-09-wing-sage/slides.pdf

jordigh 10y ago
Thanks, Will. I hope things are working out for you too.
- williamstein 10y ago
  Thanks - definitely not yet, though I still have hope and feedback from customers is very good.

sandGorgon 10y ago

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 Pro and their experience making 80k USD per month. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12925449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12925449 At first I built Sidekiq as an LGPL project and sold commercial licenses for $50. Revenue was laughably small, but the response I got was encouraging: people told me they were saving $thousands/mo over previous solutions and wanted to buy the license just to give me something as thanks. Octave currently offers support packages for which you have to write in to the maintainer and have an email discussion. Compare that with Sidekiq : http://sidekiq.org/products/pro http://sidekiq.org/products/pro Its one of the best designed gratitude-ware page...even works amazingly well on a mobile phone. We personally also buy pfsense licenses https://www.pfsense.org/our-services/gold-membership.html https://www.pfsense.org/our-services/gold-membership.html TL;Dr Donations wont work. Engineers cant give an excuse to corporate accounting. Make a pro subscription with ANY "pro level" feature. I can get my accounting to sign off. And no "contact us to find out about support contract".

vitro 10y ago
That seems like a good idea of a third party service - taking care of Pro subscriptions and invoicing for OSS projects.
chillingeffect 10y ago
Under rated post here. The key is to build a bigger solution around Octave, including say database or ML or simulation. A billable piece of IP. And streamline the surrounding commerce. ALso key is to locate Octave within the solution space, e.g. Startups who can't afford matlab. High schools. A formal online course. Makerspaces. Job seekers wanting to work with matlab.
Anechoic 10y ago
I'll add my voice as someone that would gladly pay $100/year for a few no-support type "licenses" (and I just made a long overdue donation to jwe). That said, I would understand if he didn't want to try an licensing like that for fear of angering The Mathworks.

plinkplonk 10y ago

You might want to check with the Julia folks. They now have a company (Julia Computing) backing the project. I don't know if they are hiring right now, and if so, whether you'd be a good fit, but it couldn't hurt to ask. Might be a better alternative to working for MathWorks! Julia is an open source project with many brilliant developers and mathematicians contributing. http://juliacomputing.com/ http://juliacomputing.com/ I don't see a 'jobs' page, but CEO Viral Shah (and everyone else, but Viral is who I know) is on twitter, and is a great guy. https://twitter.com/Viral_B_Shah https://twitter.com/Viral_B_Shah

spangry 10y ago
This is great (and practical) advice. I hope the Octave BDFL reads it. Continuum Analytics might be another good fit, given a decent amount of ML work coming out of academia is in the form of a matlab file. I'm not sure if by 'partner' they mean 'people we give money/people who give us money', but it costs nothing to ask: https://www.continuum.io/partners https://www.continuum.io/partners

hughw 10y ago

While recruiting at UT Austin petroleum engineering school recently, I was impressed how embedded Matlab has become there. The students use Matlab for big semester projects and everyday scratchpad computation. I believe it's a required skill. I don't know the licensing arrangement Mathworks made with them. It's common for software companies to donate licenses to engineering and science departments. It's a loss leader, and presumably lots of the students will pull Matlab licenses into their employers later. But Matlab is so ubiquitous there, and so integrated into the curriculum, it could be that money did change hands. I wonder if there's an opening along those line for a revenue stream for Octave?

hkmurakami 10y ago
Iirc student licenses are ~$100, and full licenses are ~$2500, with $1000-$1500 for additional libraries. I wonder if schools pay $0, $100, or somewhere around $300-$500.
- BeetleB 10y ago
  My university had only student licenses.

brilliantcode 10y ago

> I would love to continue as the Octave BDFL but I also need to find a way to pay the bills. Breaks my heart to see such devoted developers having so much trouble paying bills for the work they've done. I truly believe that this problem can be solved-by crowdfunding open source developments that rivals commercial status quo, we can decouple ourselves from restrictive licensing structures while paying people's bills for those who contribute to the development. Imagine if Octave just got $3000 USD / month, that should help with basic costs of living (not knowing where the original author is) and also incentivize continued development-25 years of unpaid work is a tragedy. I still have not figured out all angles but this is my dream. To help open source developers get paid and the work that becomes BSD or MIT licensed will offer a strong alternative to commercial softwares. I'm wondering if anybody else shares similar vision, please subscribe at http://letsopensource.com http://letsopensource.com or feel free to reach out at my email in my profile.

noufalibrahim 10y ago
I wonder if it's because the time investment demanded of the BDFL is so high. If there were more people and each put in smaller amounts of their time to work on the project, then it would be possible to sustain it without having to depend on the charity of users. I get the feeling that projects like Python operate like this but I have no data to back my claim.
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  Yes sort of like how Patreon crowdfunds independent youtube channels to create the content the backers want to see. I just figured out what BDFL meant :)
rabidrat 10y ago
The "Subscribe to Updates" button on that page doesn't work. Also, above the "Full Name" field, it says "invalid".
- brilliantcode 10y ago

sytelus 10y ago

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. - Create an edition like Octave Gold for $5 which has zero feature differences but has some cool logo or chrome or fun cosmetic thing. You will be surprised how many people want to pay for it.

yumaikas 10y ago
I like the idea of Octave Gold. I would totally buy something like that.
palerdot 10y ago
There a lot of variations of octave gold which can be applied to the product. I have not used octave and don't know whether the following applies to it - like a "tip from the author" in the GUI, custom themes etc.

tempire 10y ago

Contribution made. Octave is on point, and easily accessible for those wanting to learn Matlab-like syntax without having to mortgage their homes.

fooledrand 10y ago

So xoctave[1] is not commercial version of octave? [1] http://xoctave.com/blog/ http://xoctave.com/blog/

tavert 10y ago
Looks like that was one of the several third-party Octave GUI projects that predated the incorporation of an official GUI upstream in version 3.8 or 4.0 of Octave.

antirez 10y ago

Is it just my feeling/bias or projects under the GNU umbrella suffer the problem of not putting the developers at the center of the project enough? One of the things you should get back from doing something like Octave, is to be recognized at least in certain parts of the software community. When an OSS project is a GNU project maybe it is less likely to get the deserved credits, that later may lead to positions, donations, or whatever, compared to having a project on Github, regularly writing to a blog, and so forth. So, without trying to ignore the fundamental problem of a lot of work important for the society that does not compensates the developers as it should, maybe OSS developers need to get smart and try to put themselves at the center of their projects in order to get the visibility that later may save their careers.

anewhnaccount 10y ago
I agree that being under the GNU isn't necessarily good for projects. Look at https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=octave https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=octave for example. Many of these patches have in fact been merged, but nobody really knows how to use this bug tracker. Actually editing the wiki requires asking on IRC. See here: https://octave.sourceforge.io/ https://octave.sourceforge.io/ Octave should have a steady stream of students who have been made to use Matlab trying to use it instead. If the barriers were lower these people might get hooked on contributing. As it is, I imagine they take one look and think "old and busted". I don't think it's necessary to use Github, but the development tools should be something people can use frictionlessly, which isn't the case now.

jgord 10y ago

Perhaps offer tiered packages of sponsorship for companies to advertise at OctaveConf ? eg. A special thankyou to our Gold sponsor XYZ Corp who donated 10k to support Octave core developers and this conference. etc.

JoelJacobson 10y ago

$5,000 (will be) donated. Tried to use PayPal. A Top Up to my PayPal account via Instant Bank Transfer worked fine, but when I tried to use the money by making a transfer to The Octave Guy, PayPal said my account had been frozen :-( I have emailed the author and requested bank details in order to make a regular bank transfer instead.

zapu 10y ago
I think you will only need to provide additional verification for PayPal and you'll be good to go. They need to do it because of anti money laundering laws - at least here in Europe, but it's probably similar in US.
mrwilhelm 10y ago
When they catch big amount of money transfer for new accounts, they disable in order to secure it. With some verification -probably id, pasaport - they will send the money eventually. So I suggest to verify Paypal account which will be faster probably take a day.
brilliantcode 10y ago
WOW!
jordigh 10y ago
Holy shit. You really did do it. Wow, thanks!

geff82 10y ago

I like Octave so I just sent some bucks. Doesn't hurt me, but helps the cause.

tigroferoce 10y ago

I've never used so much octave (except for a couple of exams at university), but 25 years of life and work devoted to the community deserves my 10$. Thank you for all the work and good luck!

andyjohnson0 10y ago

It is interesting to contrast this with esr's recent announcement "In which, alas, I must rattle a tin cup" [1]. [1] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7348#more-7348 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7348#more-7348

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
danaliv 10y ago
I was tempted to post the same thing. ESR points fingers, talks about how bloody important he is, and scoffs at the idea of getting a job like the rest of us. JWE faces facts, asks people to make their own judgment, and talks of getting a job in a tone that isn't snobbish.

EdiX 10y ago

Free startup idea: Patreon for Open Source * Users signs up to OSPatreon, downloads OSPatreon app that creates ospatreon directory in $HOME/.local/share/ or other operating system appropriate location, then creates a cronjob (or whatever) to rerun after one month * Open Source projects that want in add a snippet of code that, when the application closes, writes the amount of time the application ran to $HOME/.local/share/ospatreon/ * At the end of the month the OSPatreon window pops up, shows the user a list of ospatreon projects the user has used, sorted by decreasing total time, lets user select how much to donate and the share each application gets (default: proportional to time the app was used) * You collect money from the user, pocket some percentage, distribute the rest to OS projects. Startup name: Fosstreon.

gregwebs 10y ago
This is a good idea. However, I think it is problematic that most open source usage is in the form of libraries. If a GUI leverages amazing open-source libraries, only the GUI author would be paid. Additionally, many closed source (GUI or not) projects leverage many open-source libraries.
- palerdot 10y ago
  It can be solved with the main app listing its oss dependencies - similar to dependencies in node package.json . the amount to be paid to the main project gets split based on the dependencies and weightage specified.

Chobicus 10y ago

Made a small donation since I've used it in Andrew Ng's ML class

vijayr 10y ago

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 for all of humanity.

jkaunisv1 10y ago
I'm very hopeful that YC's city-building efforts (if they come to fruition) will include something like this. And it's something I plan to do when I get land in the next decade (not the food/healthcare part but at least a place to stay which IMO is the biggest expense).
splitbrain 10y ago
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.
- vijayr 10y ago
  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
tluyben2 10y ago
I rather just get paid to buy those things at home and work from there on OSS projects. Everyone has a different taste, but why not just sponsor projects with money so the author(s) can buy food/stay/healthcare themselves? Or at least fund towards that?

amelius 10y ago

It's a sad truth that it is really difficult to make decent money writing scientific software.

superquest 10y ago

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 such a bill if nearly all the money went straight to the developer, I could cap my contributions, and it was extremely easy to opt-in. Ideally the package manager would read some dotfile or ask me! The problem with projects like Bountysource is that 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. Has anything like this been attempted? Edit: clarifications ...

whit537 10y ago
> 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/ 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 https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/pull/4305

hebbarp 10y ago

Yes, Octave the saviour. Sad that such projects aren't supported or there is no foundation that can come forward to help the BDFL. Made my contribution, hope it adds to the drop in the ocean. All the best.

johnmarcus 10y ago

Octave seems to have some great mentions on indeed.com. https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=octave&l= https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=octave&l= Not sure if any of those jobs are near you, but give it a look. The position titles might help you expand your search in your local area.

stevehiehn 10y ago

Jeez, This is heart breaking.

shitgoose 10y ago

this is sad. I just rediscovered octave not long ago. I have been using R, but was never comfortable with it - yukky syntax, clunky RStudio. octave has clean and solid UI, nice syntax that sticks and reasonable base packages. I wish you guys could develop a practice around octave, selling services, while keeping base product free.

HNLogInShit 10y ago

Too bad it doesn't say what Octave is.

kazinator 10y ago

Most people with an open source side project P will never be in the position of "oh, I need money; I guess I will have to find a non-P job". That's the norm.

Mikeb85 10y ago

Then make a website, register a company, and make it official. Maybe take a page from RStudio's model and adapt an IDE to use Octave. Offer a product, any product, and people will buy it. I have no doubt people will pay for the author to continue to develop Octave, but simply sending money to a PayPal account isn't something most people are comfortable with. Plus how do you invoice that?

baki 10y ago

Hmmm...Decrypt it with waterboarding!

DeAndre222 10y ago

Do you need to keep an eye on your spouse by gaining access to their emails? As a parent do you want to know what your kids do on a daily basis on social networks ( This includes facebook, twitter , instagram, whatsapp, WeChat and others to make sure theyre not getting into trouble? Whatever it is, Ranging from transfers, Criminal records, DMV, Taxes, Credit Score). No worries he can get the job done.He is a professional hacker with 10 Years+ experience.Contact him at ecodatasolution@dr.com