Re: Comfortable Octave usage on Windows

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 6:55 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 28-Apr-2009, Judd Storrs wrote:
>
> | On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Frank Luis Enrique <address@hidden>wrote:
> |
> | > Have you ever tried to sell an ungly car with a perfectly working engine?
>
> This still doesn't answer the question of where the funding will come
> from if Octave did have a pretty GUI.  Why do you think people will
> suddenly feel motivated to throw money at us if we add a GUI to
> Octave?  It seems more likely to me that they would just complain that
> it doesn't use their favorite GUI toolkit.  And anyway, none of the
> people who have provided significant funding for Octave in the past
> have ranked a GUI as a top priority.
>

Besides, this is how things work in the proprietary development -
software is developed, and then users should pay for the privilege of
using it. This must be done through restrictions, both legal and
technical, because otherwise there would be no profit.

In the free software world, the most viable model works other way
around - you pay for software to be developed or feature to be
implemented, and then you can use it freely, without restrictions,
forever. If you're still missing something (say a GUI), you pay again
someone to do it, and it can be both your teen neighbor as well as a
software corporation. Or you can always do it yourself.

The idea sinks in slowly, as most new ideas do.

-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert & GNU Octave developer
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz