Re: octave presentation, part 2

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 4:44 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 19-Nov-2008, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
>
> | Feel free to suggest additions & modifications.
>
> Your subtitle reinforces the misconception that Octave's name is
> the musical term "octave" when it is really named after a person.
>

Yes, intentionally. But I already stressed the true origin to its audience.

>
> Please consider avoiding the term "open source" when describing
> Octave.  Also, please consider avoiding the term "closed source".  See
> for example http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html.

It is my understanding that Octave is both free software and open
source (the development model). The GNU article you've just referenced
actually says "when referring to the open source position, using its
name is appropriate", which is exactly my intention.

> I think it is sufficient to say that Octave is free software distributed
> under the terms of the GPL and that Matlab is proprietary software.
> Parts of Matlab are "open source" in the sense that it is possible to
> look at the source code.
>

True. I think I'll change that to "partly closed source".


> I think Matlab was started in about 1977, around the time of the
> LINPACK andv EISPACK projects.  But that was Cleve Moler's original
> Fortran version, and is not the basis for the one people use today.
> The thing people now know as Matlab was started in around 1985.  See
> http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math.num-analysis/browse_thread/thread/485e97756fa4624?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8
> for some more about that.
>

I got the 1970 number from Wikipedia. It seems your link is a better resource.

> Work on Octave started on Feb 20 1992.  Discussions about some
> kind of software to go along with a textbook may have occurred as
> early as 1988, but that was definitely not Octave, or anything like
> the beginning of the work on it.  We (Jim Rawlings and I) were just
> discussing the idea of writing some subroutine libraries for
> educational use.  The evolution of our thinking into something that
> would result in Octave came several years later.
>

OK, I'll put 1992 there.


> Maybe replace "increment operators (++, +=...)" with "increment and
> compound assignment operators (++, *=, ...)"
>

OK

> Please don't write GNUPlot as that reinforces the misconception that
> gnpulot is somehow part of the GNU project.  It is not, and is not
> even distributed under the GNU GPL.  See the gnuplot FAQ for more
> details.

For some reason, I'm making this mistake over and over again.

>
> Although it may be useful to show comparisons like this, it is also
> possible that you will give the wrong impression, that Octave is just
> hopelessly behind, and, worse, that people should just wait until "the
> Octave team" implements all the missing features.  So during your
> presentation, I hope you will stress that Octave is developed by
> volunteers (in about ten days, myself included) so in order for it to
> improve, we need people to get involved in the process, and that there
> are a lot of ways to help even if you are not a C++ wizard.
>

This is already the second part of my talk - I stressed these points
enough in the first part (also posted to ML). This time I've been
specifically asked by some students to give somewhat detailed
comparison.
My first talk was packed with sentences like "help is wanted here".
The audience are teachers & students of numerical analysis, so I hope
to attract them for doing some projects, probably as Master or PhD
thesis.

-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz