Re: Contribution to Octave as a PM

[Julien Hamilton]

Dear All,

Thank you Fgnievinski for your ideas. I want to single out one of your points: "[the wiki Project Ideas] could be made more attractive". I really think Octave is a great product to contribute and we should clearly show it. Lots of people are looking to contribute to motivating open-source projects and if we can show that at Octave we maintain a well-organized, dynamic list of projects then I'm sure it will motivate people to join our effort. The key is also to facilitate the contributions by improving our "getting started" documents.

I also agree with improving the website. With a "corporate" website we would show that Octave is serious and can be completely used at a professional level. The first contact with an IT product is the website and trust me so many people start to judge the product by actually judging the website. The "website improvement" could be in the list of Octave projects and it would be a creative and challenging project for a web designer who wants to expand his/her portfolio.

I agree we should also focus on presentations, not only to universities but also companies: too few professionals are aware of Octave as a good replacement of MATLAB. And it's always good if we can show that (well-known) companies use Octave.

@Juan: you can find companies ready to pay people to develop completely free ("libre") software. It might sound contradictory but it happens. I give you an example: a R&D company needs a new analysis tool and notices that Octave matches half their needs. So instead of starting a tool from scratch they decide to pay a developer to develop new Octave features that will cover the remaining 50%. They accept that the code will be free because what only matters to them is that they can cut the development cost in half. Moreover they don't want to fork Octave because they still want to take advantage of the future main releases. As you can see in this scenario a paid development generated free software. This is only possible if your free product is strong enough and people are ready to invest in new features.

I think paid features and donations are a good financial model for projects like Octave. Catincan is more tailored for open-source startups and less for wide projects like Octave.

Best Regards,
Julien Hamilton