Re: Contribution to Octave as a PM

[Juan Pablo Carbajal]

On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 7:37 AM, Julien Hamilton
<address@hidden> wrote:
> 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.
>
My point is that there are values(principles, ideals, whatever) behind
being a GNU software. It is not just going around liek crazy to
collect money. There is a higher objective that we aim at and that is
libre software. I am very aware of people willing to
provide money for development of libre software, Google without going
too far away.

It would be good to listen to your idea of a "corporate" website, in
principle sounds good, but devil is in the details. Jordi has already
commented on this...
I do not think we are craving for money, money is just a tool to
achieve other objectives. And those objectives are
what really matter, not the other way around. It is important that you
familiarize yourself with the GNU perspective.

You may also be interested in the Agora project. Have you heard of it?
agora.octave.org
Suggestions/work there would be welcomed.

> 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
>

Jordi and John and other developers have been trying to build a
sustainable activity around GNU Octave. GNU Octave being their tool
for the consultant/problem-solving/task-force actions that they will
charge for. Somebody has already suggested this, but talking directly
to them (IRC #octave in freenode would be the best place) might be a
god starting point.

Cheers