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.<p>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.<p>I like to call this "gratitude-ware".<p>Check out Sidekiq Pro and their experience making 80k USD per month. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12925449" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12925449</a><p><i>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.</i><p>Octave currently offers support packages for which you have to write in to the maintainer and have an email discussion. Compare that with Sidekiq : <a href="http://sidekiq.org/products/pro" rel="nofollow">http://sidekiq.org/products/pro</a><p>Its one of the best designed gratitude-ware page...even works amazingly well on a mobile phone.<p>We personally also buy pfsense licenses <a href="https://www.pfsense.org/our-services/gold-membership.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.pfsense.org/our-services/gold-membership.html</a><p>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".
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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/boxnet-2011-9" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/boxnet-2011-9</a>
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.<p>Meanwhile, I'm sure MathWorks is looking for people with exactly your domain knowledge[0].<p><a href="https://www.mathworks.com/company/jobs/opportunities/?s_tid=hp_ff_a_careers" rel="nofollow">https://www.mathworks.com/company/jobs/opportunities/?s_tid=...</a>
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.<p>Might be a better alternative to working for MathWorks! Julia is an open source project with many brilliant developers and mathematicians contributing.<p><a href="http://juliacomputing.com/" rel="nofollow">http://juliacomputing.com/</a><p>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.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/Viral_B_Shah" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/Viral_B_Shah</a>
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 <i>sucked</i> - you're essentially dependent on people's charity and having to beg just to maintain basic economic security is inefficient, demoralizing, and unreliable.<p>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.
$5,000 (will be) donated.<p>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 :-(<p>I have emailed the author and requested bank details in order to make a regular bank transfer instead.
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 <i>fundamental</i> 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.
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.
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.<p>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?<p>Does this not happen or do we just not hear about it if it ever happens?
If you think GNU Octave has made a difference in your life or other's, please take a moment to continue funding his efforts. <a href="http://jweaton.org/?page_id=48" rel="nofollow">http://jweaton.org/?page_id=48</a>
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.<p>I wonder if there's an opening along those line for a revenue stream for Octave?
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.
It is interesting to contrast this with esr's recent announcement "In which, alas, I must rattle a tin cup" [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7348#more-7348" rel="nofollow">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7348#more-7348</a>
Some ideas for OP:<p>- Evangelize Octave in education, especially K-12. Community for Octave is rather small and K-12 education has lots of potential users and money.<p>- Apply for NSF grants<p>- Create specialized plugins that people might want to pay for commercial usage. Think of it as your consulting gig.<p>- Write book not on just using Octave but something more generic like fun with math that can have larger audience.<p>- 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.
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."
I added a slide about this to the talk I'm giving tomorrow on funding for open source math software at University of Rochester: <a href="http://wstein.org/talks/2017-02-09-wing-sage/slides.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://wstein.org/talks/2017-02-09-wing-sage/slides.pdf</a>
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.
Free startup idea: Patreon for Open Source<p>* 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<p>* 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/<p>* 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)<p>* You collect money from the user, pocket some percentage, distribute the rest to OS projects.<p>Startup name: Fosstreon.
So xoctave[1] is not commercial version of octave?<p>[1] <a href="http://xoctave.com/blog/" rel="nofollow">http://xoctave.com/blog/</a>
Could some kind of micropayment scheme help these projects make some money?<p>For web servers you might charge per request served. For text editors you might charge per unit time the editor is being used.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Has anything like this been attempted?<p>Edit: clarifications ...
I'd apply to Mathworks as BDFL of Octave and work on Matlab support for open source packages.<p>So many areas to work on. Integrating D3.js, integrating with Python machine learning/dataframe libraries, FPGAs, SMT solvers like Z3 and CVC4, ...
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.
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.<p>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?
Octave seems to have some great mentions on indeed.com. <a href="https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=octave&l=" rel="nofollow">https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=octave&l=</a>
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps offer tiered packages of sponsorship for companies to advertise at OctaveConf ?<p>eg. A special thankyou to our Gold sponsor XYZ Corp who donated 10k to support Octave core developers and this conference. etc.
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$.<p>Thank you for all the work and good luck!
Most people with an open source side project <i>P</i> will never be in the position of "oh, I need money; I guess I will have to find a non-<i>P</i> job".<p>That's the norm.
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.<p>I wish you guys could develop a practice around octave, selling services, while keeping base product free.
> I would love to continue as the Octave BDFL but I also
need to find a way to pay the bills.<p>Breaks my heart to see such devoted developers having so much trouble paying bills for the work they've done.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I'm wondering if anybody else shares similar vision, please subscribe at <a href="http://letsopensource.com" rel="nofollow">http://letsopensource.com</a> or feel free to reach out at my email in my profile.