Hi to all the Octave Maintainers. I am a co-founder of Equalis. I want to thank you all for the energy around the forum topic of whether to leverage the Equalis site in order to support the Octave community. I believe there is a bit of confusion, uncertainty, and doubt as to the mission of Equalis. As a result, I was asked to provide some clarity about our motivation in having you collaborate with us. You can consider this an “open letter” to the Octave community. Some points for you all to consider:
1) We are absolutely committed to allowing open source communities to retain all rights embodied in the license agreements under which they are distributed. As we all know, some “open source” licenses are more open than others. As a result, we don’t want to get involved in the licensing terms of the open source communities that leverage our site. Each community can decide that for themselves. Our terms of service state that the licenses under which software is distributed take precedence.
2) If you are interested in leveraging Equalis we will go further to clarifying our terms of service so that you are comfortable.
3) I am a mechanical engineer by trade, and grew up on MATLAB in university and during my technical career as a practicing engineer. I believe that it’s too expensive and the licensing is very restrictive. In this sense, we have a common cause. When it comes to numerical computation software, there are several viable open source options: Octave, Sage, and Scilab are the three most prevalent.
4) However, these open source options face two big challenges: the resources to support users (and developers) is very fragmented and there are no value-add support offerings (formal training, guaranteed SLAs for bug fixes, commercial-grade documentation, real-time tech support ,etc.).
5) To address the first challenge, we believe that all three of these open source communities would increase their adoption by making it easier on users to get access to resources all in one place. We can pay lip service to notions like “part of the charm of open source is its unruly nature.” I completely disagree with this model if the goal is to maximize the adoption and utility of the software. The easier it is to get the software, get help, get visibility on roadmap direction and get involved – the better. It’s hard to argue that having resources spread all over the internet helps this cause. Perhaps most importantly, by exposing potential users to several software choices, the best software would “win” and all communities would sharpen their focus in their respective roadmaps. By offering multiple open source software communities “under one roof” – the users win. We believe this is the ultimate goal of open source.
6) To address the second challenge, we began discussions with the Scilab developers about a year ago to enter into a collaborative model where we would provide value-added support offerings. At the same time we also had discussions with some of you directly about Octave – with full transparency about our Scilab discussions. We are also actively discussing this with the Sage community. The timing was right for the Scilab community and they embraced the opportunity. We could never get a response from the Octave community. The door is open, should you ever want to walk through it with us. These value added services are critical to increasing adoption within corporations. A few corporate users may take the risk on open source software without these value-add service offerings – the vast majority will not. Corporate users are critical in helping make software better, attracting new users, lending credibility, and co-funding development of the software (which will be returned back to the community via the open source license).
7) So what are we offering the Octave community? We can offer a one-stop user paradigm on the same basis that we provide it for Scialb: full suite of integrated services like dedicated forum(s), dedicated blog(s), dedicated group(s), a file and document library, dedicated calendar, ability to survey users and tally results, full social networking features to connect with others, and outlet channels via our Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages. Importantly, we don’t manage your content – you and your users do. We have implemented a complete, self-service back-end content management and authoring infrastructure to let you take your community where you want it to go. We’d be happiest being completely un-involved in content generation. We will be adding a free toolbox/script/code snippet exchange soon as well. Perhaps most importantly, this is not a part-time endeavor for us. We have a team of people completely dedicated to our mission.
8) We would welcome the Octave community’s input on our own website roadmap to continue to add value over the long term.
9) We are always interested in re-opening the discussions we started a year ago about commercial grade support as well.
In the end, we would be honored to have you join us. The invitation is there, the choice is yours whether you want to take advantage of it. Best Regards.
View this message in context: Open Letter to Octave Community
Sent from the Octave - Maintainers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.