RE: The future of my involvement with the Octave project

[de Almeida, Valmor F.]

John,

I am very impressed with octave. I used it (for the first time) this
past summer for an image analysis project and it helped me greatly. In a
few weeks I was able to code, and modify existing codes, to experiment
with some non-traditional image smoothing methods. I hope one day I am
able to clean up the codes and contribute to the octave image package.

I am also pleased to know that the origin of octave was the chemical
engineering profession which is my background.

I wish I had concrete suggestions for funding. I would guess that
(higher) education with octave could be an avenue of funding. Maybe
exploring parallel computer architectures if possible. Perhaps using
octave to train a new generation of students on high-level programming
and development of engineering/scientific simulation applications.

I hope you are able to keep your involvement and leadership of octave.

Thanks for your efforts.

Best regards,


--
Valmor 


> -----Original Message-----
> From: John W. Eaton [mailto:address@hidden
> Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2008 10:15 AM
> To: octave help mailing list; octave maintainers mailing list
> Subject: The future of my involvement with the Octave project
> 
> 
> 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
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