Re: Octave's goals and motivations (Re: GUI)

[Victor Salit]

I disagree with your 20% windows number. maybe 0.2%. You are forgetting the fact that octave/matlab is a highly technical and specialized product. It's vary rare. Just as an example, I work in company doing R&D and manufacturing, and of the 30 desktops one is linux, the other are windows. Only 3 people use octave. And this is in a technology company. What percentage of lawyer firm's windows desktops need octave/matlab? How many netbooks users (with windows installed) need octave/matlab?

Come on Shai, you are forgetting the fact that a company with 30 desktops is a tiny (may I say microscopic) company and in no way represents the real world. We also do R&D and manufacturing. At the location where I work we are more than 1200 people and this is not our only R&D center. Of course not all of the 1200+ are engineers and not all of the engineers need matlab/octave, but most of the engineers would find a proper use for these tools given an opportunity.  And we are not the biggest company in our business area.

 

Shai

p.s. asides from this argument about number of users, the simple fact is that the active contributors don't use windows and dont; develop for windows. As an open source project, octave goes in the direction that the contributors set -- that's life. If you want octave to go in some direction, there are 2 ways: contribute and/or pay someone to do it. You can't force contributors who do this for fun to something which is not fun for them ... 

The whole argument started as some contributors have expressed the will to show to the people how much octave is better than matlab. I only claim that unless they do not count windows users as people - they must target that 'evil' OS.

Happy New Year

Victor