This post today is what is wrong with open source software. If someone knows jwe, then they should tell him that lots of corporates and startups WANT to support stuff like this.
But you cannot give a paypal link and expect donations. As a company, I cant do that. I need an invoice. Hell, if you can get a business account, I daresay you will get subscriptions.
At first I built Sidekiq as an LGPL project and sold commercial licenses for $50. Revenue was laughably small, but the response I got was encouraging: people told me they were saving $thousands/mo over previous solutions and wanted to buy the license just to give me something as thanks.
Octave currently offers support packages for which you have to write in to the maintainer and have an email discussion. Compare that with Sidekiq : http://sidekiq.org/products/pro
Its one of the best designed gratitude-ware page...even works amazingly well on a mobile phone.
TL;Dr Donations wont work. Engineers cant give an excuse to corporate accounting. Make a pro subscription with ANY "pro level" feature. I can get my accounting to sign off. And no "contact us to find out about support contract".
I don't understand how YC can fund non-profits like VotePlz and the ACLU while not funding stuff like this. All of the startups funded by VCs use free software, often exclusively, but these VCs continue to refuse to adequately fund its development. Marc Andreessen even publicly boasted about how much OSS his companies use[1], which he of course doesn't pay for.
I also shudder to think of how Eaton will fare on the job market should he actually be forced to seek regular employment. Will he be whiteboarded? Will his work on Octave--which by all rights should be able to serve as a strong-enough resume by itself to justify his hiring--even be looked at by potential employers? And what about his age? 25 years on Octave could mean he's pushing 50. I could easily see him getting a "no hire" from plenty of trendy tech companies.
I don't understand how YC can fund non-profits like VotePlz and the ACLU while not funding stuff like this.
Whenever I read something that starts off along the lines of "I don't understand" or "It makes no sense" I wonder how much time the poster has taken to put themselves in the shoes of those they can't understand and rough out ideas that might make sense to them.
Look at VotePlz and the ACLU, the other startups YC supports, and Octave. Do you see any similarities? Any differences? The first that jumps out at me is that YC doesn't support open source for open sources' sake. It supports organizations that serve some sort of purpose other than writing software; another way to describe this is that the organizations have business models. Some of the startups might be developing services that support software development or tech rather than something consumer facing, but it's the service, rather than the software, that is being supported by YC. In that sense, VotePlz and the ACLU are similar to the startups YC supports. Octave isn't like this. What is Octave's business model, other than to develop software that can be used by others?
Please don't get me wrong. I see a lot of value in open source projects, and have used and contributed to open source projects both professionally and personally. I don't have any experience using Octave, but have no issue giving it the benefit of the doubt that it's a worthwhile project.
Perhaps I'm mistaken. Are there software projects similar to Octave that YC supports? Is there a meaningful difference between YC's startups and VotePlz and the ACLU, and open source projects such as Octave?
Will his work on Octave--which by all rights should be able to serve as a strong-enough resume by itself to justify his hiring--even be looked at by potential employers?
It'll probably register on the backs of their eyeballs somewhere. Some of them might even might even experience some momentary flash of recognition: "Octave? Right, yeah. Some GNU thingy..." before catching themselves and saying "Well that's, nice. But he doesn't have any Node or Angular, and I don't see any of the buzzwords, like 'microservices', 'serverless' or 'container' I was hoping so far. Smart guy, but too academic. And probably too fossilized at this point in his career to learn any of the shiny new stuff... but what the heck, let's give him a chance -- we'll see how he does on HackerRank".
This is not a scalable model of software funding. People may send you money today, because its on their minds, but bills will have to be paid again next month, and next year. Please get yourself, a Patreon account, or something similar.
Meanwhile, I'm sure MathWorks is looking for people with exactly your domain knowledge[0].
Patreon is awesome, but it's not enough to pay the bills full-time for most people. That said...anyone who owns an open-source project, is the primary contributor of said project and sacrifices a significant amount of possible revenue at their job to contribute to the project should have a Patreon page where anyone who feels like they want to contribute can do so. It may not be your primary source of income, but getting any income from your open-source work is a good motivator to keep working hard at making stellar software.
Would you donate a recurring amount monthly to open-source software development?
Imagine a site that auto-bills your credit card every month. You can specify projects you want to support, or just support a portfolio of projects that someone else has devised.
If so, please fill out this quick survey. I'm curious if this idea has legs:
I agree this type of plea isn't sustainable, but going to work for MathWorks is just a ridiculous suggestion. I can't believe you even seriously suggested it. There's such a giant conflict of interest you might as well suggest RMS go work for one of the remaining legacy UNIX vendors.
Although Patreon is nice, it seems to be more focused on artists and the like. A similar project focused on Open Source Software is Bounty Source Salt (https://salt.bountysource.com/)
Does it have to be scalable or ongoing for a situation like this one? I kicked in $100 simply to acknowledge past work. I don't care if the person involved takes the money, spends it on a nice vacation and never touches Octave again.
You might want to check with the Julia folks. They now have a company (Julia Computing) backing the project. I don't know if they are hiring right now, and if so, whether you'd be a good fit, but it couldn't hurt to ask.
Might be a better alternative to working for MathWorks! Julia is an open source project with many brilliant developers and mathematicians contributing.
There's something fundamentally broken about the open-source model when you can invest so much time and npt get any sort of economic return. This seems like a huge limiting factor on open-source development. As I've pointed out in discussions on copyright issues, artists value copyright because the patronage model sucked - you're essentially dependent on people's charity and having to beg just to maintain basic economic security is inefficient, demoralizing, and unreliable.
I think services like Patreon etc. are quite worthy but they're also dysfunctional. Nobody has solved the micro-payment problem yet and it seems like people have just given up trying. In a saner world this person would be rewarded for the enormous technical contribution with a reliable pension of some sort to remove the distraction of financial anxiety.
> There's something fundamentally broken about the open-source model when you can invest so much time and npt get any sort of economic return. This seems like a huge limiting factor on open-source development.
The problem we have is that OSS creators don't realize, and often willfully ignore, the fact that nothing about opensource says you can't charge for delivering value to people. Sure, their ability to copy it themselves and do stuff might reduce your leverage, but I can almost promise you that a company which generates $10,000,000/year of revenue and relies on your software, will throw money at you if you ask. Especially if you say something like "You know, since you're not paying me for this, I can totally stop maintaining it at any point and then you'll be fucked because your business relies on this".
But many engineers don't like to be business people. So here we all are.
It's really not that hard: Do people's livelihoods and businesses rely on your work? Are you improving people's lives? Charge.
Doing it for fun and no interest in making a business? That's fine, but don't expect to make a living off of a thing you're not charging money for.
Fully agree regarding your points about micro payments. Patronage, monopoly-priced copyright, and advertising have all proven to have bad side-effects.
IMO, the market may be acting rationally here. I have tried Octave several times, and always moved on with little regret. Genuine Matlab is tolerable for some prototyping tasks. A slow clone of Matlab has little value outside of academic environments where Matlab compatibility is required. Programmers use their favorite language, and others use a spreadsheet.
This is one reason, I look at contributing to open source as a way of building reusable tools I want to use.(in service of some other goal). rather than trying to contributing to them as a goal in and of itself. The most progress i seem to make are in projects of the first kind. As long as I can't justify it(time on OSS) in service to making money on some other goal, I can't work on OSS at all.
I always thought that a good open-source business model could be to develop a new version of some software and then ask for $X amount (related to how much effort it took to get to the version) to release the code. That's a win-win situation.
I see what you're saying, but I can't feel sorry for people in this position.
It's a no brainer that giving away a product for free won't be a sustainable way to earn a living. It's not like there's a big mystery around how to make money off of software.
Tried to use PayPal. A Top Up to my PayPal account via Instant Bank Transfer worked fine, but when I tried to use the money by making a transfer to The Octave Guy, PayPal said my account had been frozen :-(
I have emailed the author and requested bank details in order to make a regular bank transfer instead.
I think you will only need to provide additional verification for PayPal and you'll be good to go. They need to do it because of anti money laundering laws - at least here in Europe, but it's probably similar in US.
When they catch big amount of money transfer for new accounts, they disable in order to secure it. With some verification -probably id, pasaport - they will send the money eventually. So I suggest to verify Paypal account which will be faster probably take a day.
Is it just my feeling/bias or projects under the GNU umbrella suffer the problem of not putting the developers at the center of the project enough? One of the things you should get back from doing something like Octave, is to be recognized at least in certain parts of the software community. When an OSS project is a GNU project maybe it is less likely to get the deserved credits, that later may lead to positions, donations, or whatever, compared to having a project on Github, regularly writing to a blog, and so forth. So, without trying to ignore the fundamental problem of a lot of work important for the society that does not compensates the developers as it should, maybe OSS developers need to get smart and try to put themselves at the center of their projects in order to get the visibility that later may save their careers.
At the risk of comparing apples to boulder sized oranges, it's a shame considering Wolfram supports hundreds of employees off of Mathematica alone (something that wows my mind - in a good way - every time I'm reminded of it). I hope this drive works but also the long term prospects.
Sometimes I dream that if I ever become very wealthy (either because of something I created or because I won the lottery) I would go around and donate some nice money to these under-appreciated developers/organizations/projects.
I mean, if I had billions, wouldn't it be feasible to spend say 1M or even 0.5M to say, 100 projects? 200 maybe?
Does this not happen or do we just not hear about it if it ever happens?
Most people would rather save 1,000 people from Malaria in Africa than give 1 white college educated man living in one of the richest counties on earth a year's salary to write code from his home office.
(I am sure it happens, but I am sure that it is pretty low on the donation list)
If you think GNU Octave has made a difference in your life or other's, please take a moment to continue funding his efforts. http://jweaton.org/?page_id=48
you can also donate via the Free software foundation, I'm not sure what the author prefers, but the FSF donation can most likely be matched 100% if your company participates in a matching program.
Hopefully, adding a "for 'GNU Octave' project" note should be enough.
While recruiting at UT Austin petroleum engineering school recently, I was impressed how embedded Matlab has become there. The students use Matlab for big semester projects and everyday scratchpad computation. I believe it's a required skill. I don't know the licensing arrangement Mathworks made with them. It's common for software companies to donate licenses to engineering and science departments. It's a loss leader, and presumably lots of the students will pull Matlab licenses into their employers later. But Matlab is so ubiquitous there, and so integrated into the curriculum, it could be that money did change hands.
I wonder if there's an opening along those line for a revenue stream for Octave?
This is probably just wishful thinking, but I wish I had enough money to buy a decently large property and just let people stay there (everything free, including food/stay/healthcare etc) and work on projects like these, for as long as they want. Tech has so many rich people, I dunno why this can't be done. Even if it is just 100 high caliber people staying/working in such a community, they can generate immense value for all of humanity.
I rather just get paid to buy those things at home and work from there on OSS projects. Everyone has a different taste, but why not just sponsor projects with money so the author(s) can buy food/stay/healthcare themselves? Or at least fund towards that?
That's a nice idea. But Open Source authors have lives too. Friends, Family, etc. as much as I'd like to live rent free, I wouldn't want to move into a "camp" for Open Source authors.
I'm very hopeful that YC's city-building efforts (if they come to fruition) will include something like this. And it's something I plan to do when I get land in the next decade (not the food/healthcare part but at least a place to stay which IMO is the biggest expense).
- Evangelize Octave in education, especially K-12. Community for Octave is rather small and K-12 education has lots of potential users and money.
- Apply for NSF grants
- Create specialized plugins that people might want to pay for commercial usage. Think of it as your consulting gig.
- Write book not on just using Octave but something more generic like fun with math that can have larger audience.
- Create an edition like Octave Gold for $5 which has zero feature differences but has some cool logo or chrome or fun cosmetic thing. You will be surprised how many people want to pay for it.
For those of us not in the know, GNU Octave is, according to Wikipedia, "software featuring a high-level programming language, primarily intended for numerical computations."
[+] [-] sandGorgon|9 years ago|reply
But you cannot give a paypal link and expect donations. As a company, I cant do that. I need an invoice. Hell, if you can get a business account, I daresay you will get subscriptions.
I like to call this "gratitude-ware".
Check out Sidekiq Pro and their experience making 80k USD per month. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12925449
At first I built Sidekiq as an LGPL project and sold commercial licenses for $50. Revenue was laughably small, but the response I got was encouraging: people told me they were saving $thousands/mo over previous solutions and wanted to buy the license just to give me something as thanks.
Octave currently offers support packages for which you have to write in to the maintainer and have an email discussion. Compare that with Sidekiq : http://sidekiq.org/products/pro
Its one of the best designed gratitude-ware page...even works amazingly well on a mobile phone.
We personally also buy pfsense licenses https://www.pfsense.org/our-services/gold-membership.html
TL;Dr Donations wont work. Engineers cant give an excuse to corporate accounting. Make a pro subscription with ANY "pro level" feature. I can get my accounting to sign off. And no "contact us to find out about support contract".
[+] [-] vcistan-inmate|9 years ago|reply
I also shudder to think of how Eaton will fare on the job market should he actually be forced to seek regular employment. Will he be whiteboarded? Will his work on Octave--which by all rights should be able to serve as a strong-enough resume by itself to justify his hiring--even be looked at by potential employers? And what about his age? 25 years on Octave could mean he's pushing 50. I could easily see him getting a "no hire" from plenty of trendy tech companies.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/boxnet-2011-9
[+] [-] grzm|9 years ago|reply
Whenever I read something that starts off along the lines of "I don't understand" or "It makes no sense" I wonder how much time the poster has taken to put themselves in the shoes of those they can't understand and rough out ideas that might make sense to them.
Look at VotePlz and the ACLU, the other startups YC supports, and Octave. Do you see any similarities? Any differences? The first that jumps out at me is that YC doesn't support open source for open sources' sake. It supports organizations that serve some sort of purpose other than writing software; another way to describe this is that the organizations have business models. Some of the startups might be developing services that support software development or tech rather than something consumer facing, but it's the service, rather than the software, that is being supported by YC. In that sense, VotePlz and the ACLU are similar to the startups YC supports. Octave isn't like this. What is Octave's business model, other than to develop software that can be used by others?
Please don't get me wrong. I see a lot of value in open source projects, and have used and contributed to open source projects both professionally and personally. I don't have any experience using Octave, but have no issue giving it the benefit of the doubt that it's a worthwhile project.
Perhaps I'm mistaken. Are there software projects similar to Octave that YC supports? Is there a meaningful difference between YC's startups and VotePlz and the ACLU, and open source projects such as Octave?
[+] [-] kafkaesq|9 years ago|reply
It'll probably register on the backs of their eyeballs somewhere. Some of them might even might even experience some momentary flash of recognition: "Octave? Right, yeah. Some GNU thingy..." before catching themselves and saying "Well that's, nice. But he doesn't have any Node or Angular, and I don't see any of the buzzwords, like 'microservices', 'serverless' or 'container' I was hoping so far. Smart guy, but too academic. And probably too fossilized at this point in his career to learn any of the shiny new stuff... but what the heck, let's give him a chance -- we'll see how he does on HackerRank".
[+] [-] thedevil|9 years ago|reply
I like the way you word it - it makes it sound like a form of torture.
[+] [-] yazaddaruvala|9 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, I'm sure MathWorks is looking for people with exactly your domain knowledge[0].
https://www.mathworks.com/company/jobs/opportunities/?s_tid=...
[+] [-] tomphoolery|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bravura|9 years ago|reply
Imagine a site that auto-bills your credit card every month. You can specify projects you want to support, or just support a portfolio of projects that someone else has devised.
If so, please fill out this quick survey. I'm curious if this idea has legs:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfXIqUqsfDoUplWeWYs...
[+] [-] jlarocco|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pinewurst|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshlemer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] upofadown|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plinkplonk|9 years ago|reply
Might be a better alternative to working for MathWorks! Julia is an open source project with many brilliant developers and mathematicians contributing.
http://juliacomputing.com/
I don't see a 'jobs' page, but CEO Viral Shah (and everyone else, but Viral is who I know) is on twitter, and is a great guy.
https://twitter.com/Viral_B_Shah
[+] [-] anigbrowl|9 years ago|reply
I think services like Patreon etc. are quite worthy but they're also dysfunctional. Nobody has solved the micro-payment problem yet and it seems like people have just given up trying. In a saner world this person would be rewarded for the enormous technical contribution with a reliable pension of some sort to remove the distraction of financial anxiety.
[+] [-] mamcx|9 years ago|reply
You need to plug the bussines model to sourcecode, similar how you need to plug one to binary.
Unfortunately, give source is in a lot of ways give the MOST SIGNIFICANT VALUABLE OUTPUT a programmer do.
[+] [-] Swizec|9 years ago|reply
The problem we have is that OSS creators don't realize, and often willfully ignore, the fact that nothing about opensource says you can't charge for delivering value to people. Sure, their ability to copy it themselves and do stuff might reduce your leverage, but I can almost promise you that a company which generates $10,000,000/year of revenue and relies on your software, will throw money at you if you ask. Especially if you say something like "You know, since you're not paying me for this, I can totally stop maintaining it at any point and then you'll be fucked because your business relies on this".
But many engineers don't like to be business people. So here we all are.
It's really not that hard: Do people's livelihoods and businesses rely on your work? Are you improving people's lives? Charge.
Doing it for fun and no interest in making a business? That's fine, but don't expect to make a living off of a thing you're not charging money for.
[+] [-] nuntius|9 years ago|reply
IMO, the market may be acting rationally here. I have tried Octave several times, and always moved on with little regret. Genuine Matlab is tolerable for some prototyping tasks. A slow clone of Matlab has little value outside of academic environments where Matlab compatibility is required. Programmers use their favorite language, and others use a spreadsheet.
[+] [-] wolfgke|9 years ago|reply
Also with copyright you are essentially dependent on people's willingness to pay.
[+] [-] aangjie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xtracto|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlarocco|9 years ago|reply
It's a no brainer that giving away a product for free won't be a sustainable way to earn a living. It's not like there's a big mystery around how to make money off of software.
[+] [-] was_boring|9 years ago|reply
what is this problem?
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] JoelJacobson|9 years ago|reply
Tried to use PayPal. A Top Up to my PayPal account via Instant Bank Transfer worked fine, but when I tried to use the money by making a transfer to The Octave Guy, PayPal said my account had been frozen :-(
I have emailed the author and requested bank details in order to make a regular bank transfer instead.
[+] [-] zapu|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrwilhelm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordigh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brilliantcode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hakcermani|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antirez|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petercooper|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saganus|9 years ago|reply
I mean, if I had billions, wouldn't it be feasible to spend say 1M or even 0.5M to say, 100 projects? 200 maybe?
Does this not happen or do we just not hear about it if it ever happens?
[+] [-] brianwawok|9 years ago|reply
(I am sure it happens, but I am sure that it is pretty low on the donation list)
[+] [-] justinclift|9 years ago|reply
There are others too. :)
[+] [-] dhuramas|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmarsy|9 years ago|reply
Hopefully, adding a "for 'GNU Octave' project" note should be enough.
[+] [-] hughw|9 years ago|reply
I wonder if there's an opening along those line for a revenue stream for Octave?
[+] [-] vijayr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tluyben2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] splitbrain|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkaunisv1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andyjohnson0|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7348#more-7348
[+] [-] sytelus|9 years ago|reply
- Evangelize Octave in education, especially K-12. Community for Octave is rather small and K-12 education has lots of potential users and money.
- Apply for NSF grants
- Create specialized plugins that people might want to pay for commercial usage. Think of it as your consulting gig.
- Write book not on just using Octave but something more generic like fun with math that can have larger audience.
- Create an edition like Octave Gold for $5 which has zero feature differences but has some cool logo or chrome or fun cosmetic thing. You will be surprised how many people want to pay for it.
[+] [-] mooreds|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] n00b101|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samfisher83|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhermher|9 years ago|reply
Wouldn't paying for contributions to Octave devs not save them money versus Matlab licenses?
[+] [-] nileshtrivedi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supahfly_remix|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] williamstein|9 years ago|reply