Re: Octave reputation

[Michael Goffioul]

On 6/13/07, Søren Hauberg <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>   I was just talking to one of my professors about how much more
> wonderful Octave is compared to Matlab. And he made the following
> statements against octave:
>
> 1) Octave isn't developed any more.
> 2) Octave doesn't have any of the toolboxes that matlab has.
>
> Now both of these statements are completely wrong which I told him, but
> that's not the point. The point is that people (I've heard these
> arguments several times before) _think_ these statements are correct.
>   I'm guessing that statement 1 is because there hasn't been a stable
> release in years. Octave 3.0 will fix that (yay!).
>   I don't really know why Octave-forge is unknown.
>   Anyway, I'm writing this mail to ask how we should avoid people
> making these statements in the future? The way I see it, we should
>
> 1) Have stable releases more often (after 3.0 of course).
> 2) Put more visible links to Octave-Forge on the Octave website.
>
> Anyway, I just want to let out some steam. I get really annoyed when
> people avoid Octave simply because of its reputation.

For the record, I've also been told that octave has less toolboxes than
Matlab (in this case, the main focus being on signal processing and
communications; this is wrong), that toolboxes or octave aren't commercially
supported and that there was a lack of confidence in the numerical
results that could come out of octave.

So, I agree, reputation does matter.

Michael.