Octave popularity

[niles]

The current "Linux Journal" has an article about "rlab" another
free Mat*ab implementation, that doesn't look half as good as Octave
(IMHO).  I don't think it's a good thing to split the few freeware
programmers in this field between, rlab, octave, and SciLab.  Without
outside developer interest the project will burn out the
orig. author. (jwe has done 99% of the work!)  The Linux community,
which seems to be the largest current consumer of free software, seems
largely ignorant of Octave and heavily leaning toward the other two.
The "Linux Journal" has mentioned rlab, and Scilab many times and
don't know that they EVER mentioned Octave.  Also, it seems from the
article that many rep. people (Univ. profs) are contributing
"toolboxes" to rlab.  Those are toolboxes that could of been written
for Octave.  Of course, since it's all GPL we could still "port"
them. I personally, would like to see more users and developers use my
favorite, Octave.  Therefore, I propose two things: (1) a new official
version is released soon (it has so many nice features now and it's
been so long!) (2) jwe and/or some us other people write an article
for the "Linux Journal".  My impression is that they're always
desperate for new material if you write it they'll put it in the next
issue.  (Of course, anything anyones writes should be checked with
jwe, first, to be polite. :)

What does everyone think?  Of course, no one but jwe can decide a release
date, but it's just a suggestion.

        Thanks,
        Rick Niles.