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Meanwhile, MathWorks annual revenue is over $800 million.
by n00b101 10y ago
Meanwhile, MathWorks annual revenue is over $800 million.
- pm90 10y agoHonest 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 agoThe 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 agoAre there any people willing to pay for Matlab? It's usually purchased by departments, not end users.
- n00b101 10y agoOctave 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...