Re: Interactive visualization (eg, using D3)?

[Matt Sundquist]

Hey Jordi,

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions. I really appreciate your thoughtful response and suggestions.

We've tried our best to make the product easy to use, simple to get started on, and the best possible product for users. Of particular interest to this group is probably the MATLAB one, and our policies (which we've cemented thanks to the discussion from this list). We'd love feedback on both.

A couple brief points:

• People can fork our APIs, or include them in packages, e.g., https://modelingguru.nasa.gov/docs/DOC-1696. 
  
• Users hold the rights to their data.
  
• We don't charge for public graphs or storage, and have free use of the API for making public graphs.
  
• If anyone wants to export their data, download graphs, scripts, or data to store them, etc., they definitely can.
  

Any and all suggestions, feedback, and thoughts welcome. We're still quite early and new, so it's great to get feedback like this from thoughtful folks who have engaged these topics before.

My very best,

Matt

On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 2:22 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden> wrote:

On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 15:32 -0800, wolframteetz <address@hidden> wrote:
> Of course, plot.ly will sometimes do, but I'm not a big fan of cloud
> services, i like to keep my data myself.

I'm not a fan of that either, beginning with how vague the marketing
buzzword "cloud" is.

Below was my response to Matt. Basically, if plot.ly were freed up, it
would be easier to keep your data yourself. While plot.ly currently
does offer ways to get the raw data, this is partially useless without
being able to host the actual plots yourself.

------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Cc: John W. Eaton <address@hidden>, Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: Plotly Beta: Cloud-based Graphing and Analytics library
Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 10:26:57 -0500

Hi, Matt.

On Mon, 2013-12-02 at 22:54 -0600,  Matt Sundquist <address@hidden> wrote:
> I wanted to reach out about Plot.ly, a graphing and analytics
> project.

Your post to help-octave about plot.ly is currently stuck in the
moderation queue. I'm not quite sure what to do about it. On the one
hand, plot.ly looks cool, and I think what you guys are trying to do
has lots of technical merit. On the other hand, you're promoting
non-free software on a GNU mailing list, and we generally frown upon
that. If plot.ly could become AGPL or similar, I would not have
reservations about announcing it on the Octave list:

    http://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html

I personally am a little uncomfortable with the thought of users' data
being at the mercy of your server. If the server goes down, so do the
plots! If plot.ly has bugs and breaks, we are at the mercy of your dev
team, no ability to fix it otherwise. If your company flops or gets
bought by Google or whatever, the service also disappears. These are
problems that do not empower the end user.

I reiterate: I think a much better model that would allow you to keep
your business while not taking power away from users would be AGPL and
selling exceptions. The bulk of your offering is in hosting the
service and providing support for it. Anyone who wants to fix plot.ly
for themselves or take on the burden of hosting it would be able to,
but I predict that they would still prefer to pay someone else to
handle this. And AGPL with selling exceptions means nobody takes
without giving something back, either code or money. This seems to me
much more equitable than taking important freedoms away from your
users.

I have CC'ed a few other people. They might have a different opinion
about this.

- Jordi G. H.