Re: Simulink for Octave

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 19 August 2011 18:28, xavion <address@hidden> wrote:

> I'd say the Octave developers are spending THEIR time making ZERO
> money.

There's more to life than making money, but money is nice, and I
personally am getting paid for working on Octave, which is also nice.
Companies do this sometime, they want to use free software, but the
software doesn't quite fit what they want it to do, so they pay
someone to improve it.

> A healthy REWARD is deserved for developing an astonishing
> and powerful tool. My humble recommendation... develop a
> Simulink-like capability compatible with Octave as an open source &
> free tool. Then sell some additional toolboxes at an affordable
> price. For me, I would not mind paying $50 to $100 dollars for a
> toolbox. If you sell 100,000 tool boxes, that's $10M in revenue.
> Does that motivate you?

Fantasy accounting? Not really. I'm motivated by other reasons.

You have repeated this idea many times, but let me tell you how that
would happen if it would. We wouldn't be selling toolboxes without
accompanying source and permission to redistribute them freely. It's
just how we do things here. We believe people's freedom to modify,
study, and redistribute code is much more important.

That being said, software can and has been sold freely, but it's
tricky to do so. I've seen several projects for example give the
source away for free but require you to pay for Windows and Mac OS X
binaries. Xchat and Ardour are two projects that do this:

     http://ardour.org/download
     http://xchat.org/windows/

I don't know how successful these two are at making money, but I doubt
they are making millions of dollars as you suggest.

> My only concern is that Matlab will soon realize this and offer to
> buy out Ocatve. Please don't sell your soul.

I think most of us working on Octave are too stubborn to sell out. I
know I am. I am quite disgusted by the idea of doing scientific
computation with license managers and hidden source code, and I
wouldn't want to be reponsible for making anyone suffer through that.
I personally want to help you do better scientific computation. I'm
not so interested in making sure you do it without pay.

- Jordi G. H.