I'm looking for a cofounder for a small business deal. I want to sell GNU Octave. Something like what the Julia folks are doing[1]. I do not foresee this will be a startup, not a build once, sell infinitely often kind of deal (I don't consider what the Julia people are doing is a startup either). We are in all probability not going to become millionaires. But hopefully we will be doing good in the world and we will find a way to fund others who are. Matlab is huge, and while Julia and Python chip around the edges of its market dominance, we need something like Octave that can take it head-on and be a drop-in replacement.
I do mathematics and programming. I know GNU Octave well, and I also know its community. I don't know how to do market research, advertising, how to negotiate contracts, or how to look for funding. If you think you could help me, contact me at jordigh@octave.org
(Apart from using Octave i am unable to currently pursue any such opportunities)
I have one question; how do you foresee the competition's reaction to any sustained success? Certainly if you are successful, they are free to subtly change how MATLAB functions in small ways to break what you do. Right? Or am I missing something?
They already do that. Chasing after Matlab compatibility is no fun, but someone has to do it.
My impression right now is that Octave is too small for the Mathworks to take us seriously. It will take a lot of work to make Octave grow into something big enough for the Mathworks to acknowledge our existence. Hopefully by the time Octave is that big, we will have the means to defend ourselves, if it comes to that.
Both. And Red Hat also does both. You don't get access to download their software if you don't pay. If selling custom binaries for Octave works (under the terms of the GPL, of course), we should try that too.
I suppose you could sell custom binaries, but if you distribute them, you likely have to publish the code. That said, you could maybe run them in the cloud yourself and sell access.
> but if you distribute them, you likely have to publish the code.
Sure, publish the code to the person we sell them to, and no one else. If they want to take the job of rebuilding the binaries themselves, they're welcome to try, but I think the hassle of doing that is what we would be getting paid to do.
Maintaining an online version of Octave seems like another possibility. A couple of people have already built online versions of Octave, and when I approached one of them several months ago, they seemed receptive to the idea to commercialise it.
I'm looking for a cofounder for a small business deal. I want to sell GNU Octave. Something like what the Julia folks are doing[1]. I do not foresee this will be a startup, not a build once, sell infinitely often kind of deal (I don't consider what the Julia people are doing is a startup either). We are in all probability not going to become millionaires. But hopefully we will be doing good in the world and we will find a way to fund others who are. Matlab is huge, and while Julia and Python chip around the edges of its market dominance, we need something like Octave that can take it head-on and be a drop-in replacement.
I do mathematics and programming. I know GNU Octave well, and I also know its community. I don't know how to do market research, advertising, how to negotiate contracts, or how to look for funding. If you think you could help me, contact me at jordigh@octave.org
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9516298