Re: USING Octave in a commercial environment

[Luke M]

ygramul wrote:
> 
> Thank you for the detailed replies, Jordi and John. That clears up a lot
> of questions I had.

I've gotten quite a bit of pushback at my engineering firm when I suggested
replacing a portion of our Matlab usage with Octave.  The prime issue, I'm
told, is corporate responsibility:  if we make a mission-critical decision
based on results from a Matlab analysis that turn out to be wrong through no
fault of our own, we might seek damages from The MathWorks.  On a related
note, we'd have to be absolutely certain that Octave provides the same
answers.  Additionally, we have a very large amount of Matlab code that
needs to be checked and possibly ported, and then in some cases we'd have
two codebases with the same purpose.  Lastly, though Octave is quite
similar, there would still be some training and learning curve involved,
especially because about half of the engineers use the GUI.

Most recently I was told that the best way to pitch this would be to
identify a specific application that could be moved to Octave, and show the
costs and potential savings involved.  That's probably true since you have
to pitch to management, but personally I think the opposite is the best way:
all those small utility files we write in Matlab should be the ones to move
first.  Why bother taking up a floating license just to produce some CSV
files for an Excel-using group or just to check some numbers from an old
analysis?  Unfortunately there are no solid numbers behind those, so we're
still stuck.

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