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Re: Octave poster


From: David Grundberg
Subject: Re: Octave poster
Date: Sun, 03 Oct 2010 18:39:39 +0200
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.24 (X11/20100411)

Fotios Kasolis skrev:
> Every commercial program out there has a simplified eye candy presentation 
> (or sth similar) for their (in many cases stupid) product. So why should not 
> we??? So here we are again; me presenting eye candy poster for promoting 
> Octave (the difference is that we do have a good product and ... we do not 
> lie about quality ; ).
> 

It looks absolutely stunning, Fotios!  What if this was the front web
page?  Wow.

As you are posting it to octave-maintainers I'm assuming you are looking
for feedback.  It's ok if you ignore my feedback, but please don't just
shoot back immediately defending your work.  I'm trying to make your
work better.

The term "high compatibility with commercial products" is filled with
implications.

Having the disjoint categories "free software" and "commercial software"
is a false dichotomy.  GNU Octave is free software.  So a lot of people
might come to the (wrong!) conclusion to that GNU Octave is
"non-commercial".  This is false.  Free software is compatible with
making money, in fact, it is explicitly allowed.  It is very important
that everyone involved tries to promote this view of free software,
because free software would benefit from commercial interest.  (Without
using the term "open source".)

Also the word "product" is confusing when thinking of software, because
products are tangible, scarce things while software are abstract,
abundant things.  Some proprietary software developers like to merge
these terms for their own purposes, because they want you to believe
that their software is scarce.

Software like MATLAB and Mathematica are proprietary and commercial.
GNU software is free software and commercial.

Maybe it's better to be concrete and just say "Interpreter capable of
executing MATLAB scripts" or something like that.  Note that MATLAB is
better at being MATLAB than Octave ever will be.  (By definition.)  We
shouldn't fool people into thinking that Octave is a complete clone.
That would only make people disappointed.  And we don't want that :)

Also I don't think it's a particularly tasteful to have Adobe's icons
and logos on there.  Adobe develops only proprietary software and they
get a lot of unwarranted advertisement for their software as it is.
Could you change it to something else?

> If you enjoy it, use it!! Everything on that poster (icons, fonts) is GPL so 
> it is ok. I do not know the license of Chica mono font used for the title.
> 
> http://www8.cs.umu.se/~fotios/OctavePoster.pdf
> 
> /Fotis
> 



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