Re: Open Letter to Octave Community

[Søren Hauberg]

Hi

I must confess I got somewhat lost in your long letter, which is why I
didn't reply sooner. Are you offering to host Octave websites? I mean,
something that would replace http://www.octave.org or
http://octave.sf.net ? Or are you offering to do commercial support for
Octave? Or something else...?

Soren

ons, 13 10 2010 kl. 15:15 -0700, skrev Carmine Napolitano:
> Hi to all the Octave Maintainers. I am a co-founder of Equalis. I want
> to thank you all for the energy around the forum topic of whether to
> leverage the Equalis site in order to support the Octave community. I
> believe there is a bit of confusion, uncertainty, and doubt as to the
> mission of Equalis. As a result, I was asked to provide some clarity
> about our motivation in having you collaborate with us. You can
> consider this an “open letter” to the Octave community. Some points
> for you all to consider: 1) We are absolutely committed to allowing
> open source communities to retain all rights embodied in the license
> agreements under which they are distributed. As we all know, some
> “open source” licenses are more open than others. As a result, we
> don’t want to get involved in the licensing terms of the open source
> communities that leverage our site. Each community can decide that for
> themselves. Our terms of service state that the licenses under which
> software is distributed take precedence. 2) If you are interested in
> leveraging Equalis we will go further to clarifying our terms of
> service so that you are comfortable. 3) I am a mechanical engineer by
> trade, and grew up on MATLAB in university and during my technical
> career as a practicing engineer. I believe that it’s too expensive and
> the licensing is very restrictive. In this sense, we have a common
> cause. When it comes to numerical computation software, there are
> several viable open source options: Octave, Sage, and Scilab are the
> three most prevalent. 4) However, these open source options face two
> big challenges: the resources to support users (and developers) is
> very fragmented and there are no value-add support offerings (formal
> training, guaranteed SLAs for bug fixes, commercial-grade
> documentation, real-time tech support ,etc.). 5) To address the first
> challenge, we believe that all three of these open source communities
> would increase their adoption by making it easier on users to get
> access to resources all in one place. We can pay lip service to
> notions like “part of the charm of open source is its unruly nature.”
> I completely disagree with this model if the goal is to maximize the
> adoption and utility of the software. The easier it is to get the
> software, get help, get visibility on roadmap direction and get
> involved – the better. It’s hard to argue that having resources spread
> all over the internet helps this cause. Perhaps most importantly, by
> exposing potential users to several software choices, the best
> software would “win” and all communities would sharpen their focus in
> their respective roadmaps. By offering multiple open source software
> communities “under one roof” – the users win. We believe this is the
> ultimate goal of open source. 6) To address the second challenge, we
> began discussions with the Scilab developers about a year ago to enter
> into a collaborative model where we would provide value-added support
> offerings. At the same time we also had discussions with some of you
> directly about Octave – with full transparency about our Scilab
> discussions. We are also actively discussing this with the Sage
> community. The timing was right for the Scilab community and they
> embraced the opportunity. We could never get a response from the
> Octave community. The door is open, should you ever want to walk
> through it with us. These value added services are critical to
> increasing adoption within corporations. A few corporate users may
> take the risk on open source software without these value-add service
> offerings – the vast majority will not. Corporate users are critical
> in helping make software better, attracting new users, lending
> credibility, and co-funding development of the software (which will be
> returned back to the community via the open source license). 7) So
> what are we offering the Octave community? We can offer a one-stop
> user paradigm on the same basis that we provide it for Scialb: full
> suite of integrated services like dedicated forum(s), dedicated
> blog(s), dedicated group(s), a file and document library, dedicated
> calendar, ability to survey users and tally results, full social
> networking features to connect with others, and outlet channels via
> our Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages. Importantly, we don’t
> manage your content – you and your users do. We have implemented a
> complete, self-service back-end content management and authoring
> infrastructure to let you take your community where you want it to go.
> We’d be happiest being completely un-involved in content generation.
> We will be adding a free toolbox/script/code snippet exchange soon as
> well. Perhaps most importantly, this is not a part-time endeavor for
> us. We have a team of people completely dedicated to our mission. 8)
> We would welcome the Octave community’s input on our own website
> roadmap to continue to add value over the long term. 9) We are always
> interested in re-opening the discussions we started a year ago about
> commercial grade support as well. In the end, we would be honored to
> have you join us. The invitation is there, the choice is yours whether
> you want to take advantage of it. Best Regards. 
> 
> ______________________________________________________________________
> View this message in context: Open Letter to Octave Community
> Sent from the Octave - Maintainers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.