The future of my involvement with the Octave project

[John W. Eaton]

For more than 16 years now, a large part of my job has been "work on
Octave".  It's been a great experience and I would love for it to
continue.  However, my employment has always been dependent on
external grant funding and that has been harder to come by in the last
few years.  As things stand now, funding for my position will end on
November 30.  So unless something unexpected happens in the next month
or two (perhaps there is a generous patron out there?) I'll be looking
for a job, and I expect that my time available to work on Octave will
be severely limited.

What does this mean for the future of Octave?  That depends on what
the members of the community decide to do.

I think we have an amazing group of people working on Octave.  That
most of you have done all of these great things working as volunteers
in your spare time is even more incredible to me.  I'm very grateful
for the things you are doing as it is unlikely that Octave would be
where it is today without all the people who have contributed to
Octave's development over the years.

Octave is free software, so whatever happens it will not go away, and
at this point the community is more than capable of keeping the
project moving forward even without my work.  Although I plan to
remain active in the community, I can't say for sure how much I will
be able to do if I am forced to find another job.  But since that's a
definite probability, I thought it would be best to provide some
advance notice so that we might discuss possible solutions, and
prepare for the changes that are likely to come.  That's one of the
reasons that I've been trying to move more things to public servers
(like savannah) so we can share the work more easily or others can
take over without much trouble if that turns out to be necessary.

Finally, if you have any ideas for ways to fund Octave development,
I'd certainly like to discuss them.

Thanks,

jwe