Re: About Octave

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

Hi, Jijquan. In what follows I never use the word "free" to mean
"gratis". Free as in freedom, y'know?

On 19 August 2012 18:16, Jiquan Ngiam <address@hidden> wrote:
> Sorry for the late reply, we were swamped in the last few weeks, and
> I'm just catching up on my email back log.

My turn to apologise for delaying my reply. I will attempt to follow
up more promptly in the future.

> Off the top of my head, one of the bigger issues for the script was
> with authentication / submissions over http. In particular, Octave
> only supposed http (not https) and so we had to come up with
> different solutions for authentication.

Ok, so SSL may be desirable. We're already using libcurl and I
understand this does SSL, so it should just be a matter of turning it
on. Can you give me an example of what kind of code you have in mind
that should use SSL? Does Matlab already have an interface to do this?

> Another issue we had (sorry if I'm just throwing many things out --
> I really like what you guys are doing and by no means am unhappy)
> was with Octave on Windows and path / include problems.

Yes, we keep having trouble with paths on Windows. This is a recurrent
bug. The biggest problem is that we don't have enough people working
on Windows, so our Windows bug hunting always lags behind. Can you or
someone else at Coursera help us with Windows development.

> Finally, it would be also nice if there's a standard page for
> helping someone walk through installation for Octave on various
> platforms; we wrote up one at
> https://class.coursera.org/ml/wiki/view?page=OctaveInstallation ,
> but I think I'm still ran into some issues with plotting on a Mac.

Well, we have this:

    http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/download.html

which mostly points to the wiki. Yes, I know there is a trouble
distributing binaries. Again, this is mostly because we don't have
enough people working on building something like a Mac OS X bundle.
Ben Abbot has been trying, but it's a very difficult task. The next
best thing we have is packaging systems. Macports and homebrew seem to
be most updated ones.

In order to help with the headaches of distribution on non-free OSes,
we are considering making binaries for Windows and Mac OS X and offer
them on a pay-what-you-want scheme for download (but not pay nothing).
However, we will be doing this freely. If for example Coursera obtains
these hypothetical binaries from us after paying whatever Coursera
thinks is appropriate, there can be no further restriction on
redistributing these binaries, as required by the GPL. So Coursera
could buy these binaries once and give them out to their students as
needed.

> p/s: We recently got an email from a student saying that they had a
> problem running Octave on his Mac with Mountain Lion -- just thought
> I'd pass it on. https://class.coursera.org/ml/forum/search?q=octave

I can't see that without logging in to Coursera, but logging in
requires agreeing to legalese I considered too onerous:

    
http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/Stanford-University-Probabilistic-Graphical-Models-tp4470602p4470781.html

Reading them again, they seem to have changed since last time I looked
at them. What I now find objectionable is that the ToS forbid me from
freely using Coursera's materials but requires that I give them my own
materials for them to use freely. I do not consider this a fair trade.
Is it really impossible to use a CC license for Coursera's own things?
I wish Coursera encouraged sharing. I see lots of benefit from
students learning from each other, and it helps if Coursera's own
materials aren't restricted.

> Thanks so much for the great work with Octave and we're looking
> forward to having even more classes on Coursera use it!

I'm very hopeful about Coursera. I don't know if this really will be
the revolutionary future of education, but I hope it will be. I
enjoyed the original machine learning class very much, and I hope
others will be able to keep enjoying them.

> (Did you guys see a spike in users after the ml-class?)

Yes, there was a definite spike. Coursera has given Octave a lot of
exposure, and for that at least I am grateful. I dream of a future in
which numerical computing and education in general is done with free
tools, unfettered by restrictive license agreements and without secret
mathematics nor black boxes. I will be happy to always be able to tell
Coursera students who want to know more "you want to know how Octave
does this computation? Look at line XXX of file YYY at this url."
Education should pique humans' natural curiousity and allow them
further object of study if they seek it.

Thanks for working towards that goal.

- Jordi G. H.