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I'm no longer working on Octave


From: John W. Eaton
Subject: I'm no longer working on Octave
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2013 03:00:14 -0400

I've made my last change to Octave.  Unfortunately, it's not the great
change I was hoping it would be -- you know, the kind of change that
would get me inducted into the Hacker Hall of Fame.  Instead, it's
just a stupid little change, and I did it in kind of a crummy way.  I
reversed the terminal colors in the new GUI so that the text is black
and the background is white on Windows systems.  I know, fantastic new
feature, right?

I hate to leave things like that, but after pouring my heart and soul
into the project for more than 21 years, I've had all I can take.  As
I was checking in that last change it really struck me how pointless
it all is.  I mean, who really cares what the terminal window colors
are?  And why am I wasting what precious little time I have here on
Earth changing them around?  It all really began to feel unimaginably
silly.  And then I suddenly came to the complete and utter realization
that I truly have no more patience for another bug report about how
"sin(pi) is not exactly zero", or some other armchair quarterback over
in the peanut gallery calling me and other hard working Octave
developers names like "kindergartners" because we sometimes make
mistakes.  All I can say is, "is anyone perfect?"

As far as I can tell, all anyone really wants from the Octave project
is an exact clone of Matlab with a price tag of zero.  We've tried for
more than 20 years to explain the importance of software freedom, but
no matter what we do or say, people are still squarely focused on
Octave's missing features and the relative pricing structures.  It's
crystal clear to me now that freedom doesn't matter one iota, and a
price of $0 is not low enough if there is even ONE bug or missing
feature.  So I say screw it, this whole software freedom thing is just
an aging hippy fantasy anyway.  I honestly do not know what those
people are smoking.

For those of you who will, no doubt, continue to work on Octave
anyway, there's probably nothing I can do to dissuade you from your
folly.  So I suppose I might as well wish you the best of luck.  But I
beg of you, please don't contact me asking for help.  I really want to
put this 20+ year long nightmare behind me as quickly as possible.  To
that end, I've written up some quick notes about what I'm thinking of
doing next.  If you are at all interested, you can read them here:

  http://jweaton.org/future-plans--is-there-any-other-kind.html

jwe


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