Looking for Work after 25 Years of Octave

From: John W. Eaton Subject: Looking for Work after 25 Years of Octave Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2017 15:21:06 -0500 User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Icedove/45.2.0

TL;DR: Reflecting on the last 25 of Octave, it's been a great experience. I would love to continue as the Octave BDFL but I also need to find a way to pay the bills. It's hard to believe that almost 25 years have passed since I started the Octave project. It's been a great experience. I've met many interesting and talented people along the way. I'm grateful for everyone[1] who has made Octave the successful project that it is today. There is no way that the project would be as successful as it is without their many contributions. As I've said many times, I thought the project would last a year or two. I never intended for it to be a career, but now it is hard to imagine doing anything else. There are still many projects I would like to tackle. I want to continue refactoring the interpreter so that it is easier to understand, simpler to work with, and more reliable. I want to improve the performance of the interpreter and make the GUI more useful. I'd love to be able to devote my full attention and energy to these projects for as long as I am able. But I must also face the reality of my financial situation. For the last 8 years I have been almost able to pay my expenses by offering support contracts. Recently though, the balance has shifted in the wrong direction so that I am using personal savings to maintain my ability to contribute to Octave development. There seems to be no way to avoid it any longer: I need to find a way to generate significant funding for my work on Octave or find a (non-Octave) job. So this is where you come in. If Octave is useful to you, or if you believe that Octave is an important project, then I need your help to keep going. If you think Octave is worthy of a few (or many!) dollars, I would be glad to make a fair trade of dollars for continued development, improvements, and support. I would be grateful for any direct donations, payments for support contracts, or for specific improvements to Octave. Whatever works for you. You can fund my work directly by following the link to PayPal on this page: http://jweaton.org/?page_id=48 or, if you are in the United States and a tax-deductible donation is important to you, you can contribute to the Octave project through the Free Software Foundation here: https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=10

or, if you have support needs that are not being met, then please

contact me and I would be glad to discuss options with you.

Alternatively, I would be grateful for any leads you might have for employment opportunities. Thanks! jwe

[1] Almost 400 at last count:

reply via email to



[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]