RE: Open Letter to Octave Community

[Carmine Napolitano]

Hi,  sorry for the delayed response, but never got notified of your posting for 
some reason.  Anyway, we are offering our platform to the Octave community to 
do what you wish with it.  We have the ability to do the following in an 
integrated manner:  an interest group (like a website), a forum, a blog, wikis, 
file libraries, calendaring, social networking, etc.  We'll be adding file 
exchange (think code snippets and scripts) and a hosted Subversion (we were 
approved as an open source site with Codesion) soon.  

Here's the summary, we're a new channel for your community.  We were asked by 
our members to create an Octave presence, along with Sage and Scilab.  We did 
that.  But to make it flourish we need power users and maintainers to jump in - 
we don't have this expertise.  Scilab users jumped in - we're offering you the 
same thing.  Most importantly, we want a collaborative spirit where we can work 
together to support Octave.

Carmine 

-----Original Message-----
From: Soren Hauberg [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 2010 7:22 AM
To: Carmine Napolitano
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Open Letter to Octave Community

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.