Re: The future of Octave

[flatmax]

On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, John W. Eaton wrote:
>   Free software needs a vision beyond reimplementation of existing
>   proprietary tools.  Those of us who are interested in free software
>   tools must become leaders rather than followers, and I am optimistic
>   that this can happen for numerical software.  But I don't believe it
>   can happen if Octave continues down its current path.

I agree with this statement.
A good example would be the incorperation of a spline functionality -
easily accomplished using PD's fitpack from NETLIB. The problem would be
that the resulting spline functions would differ to Matlab spline
functions ... none the less they would be completely robust, and very
powerful, but people probably wouldn't understand why these functions
wouldn't mimic Matlab.

The numbers of people who convert to Octave from Matlab and expect to
re-use their code must be phenominal !

Thanks for implementing and maintaining a great numerical tool.

Matt



-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
-------------------------------------------------------------