Re: Octave and cargo cult programmingHello

[Dan Muresan]

> 1) octave is not a monopoly, there are other alternatives available;
> moreover octave is GPL'ed, anybody is free to fork the code base and provide
> an alternate solution, as long as it is compatible with the GPL license

First of all, Octave has become what it is due to its virtues. I did
not mean "monopoly" as a negative term, but as a de-facto description.

As far as "you can always fork it", let's get real: once a project of
such force (user-wise and community-wise) is in place, the marginal
utility for any would-be dissenter is much, much smaller than the
incentives for joining in. I will change my opinion when I see a major
open-source project with a large active community (like Linux) forked
successfully for the  long term.

> 2) the octave community doesn't owe you anything, quality or functionality;
> the software is provided as-is, if it doesn't fulfill your need, well, too
> bad for you; the best you can do then is to help the community to make it
> better

As I said, I have no intention of getting into any functionality
debates, and I have no outstanding complaints about Octave (though I
have been bit by broadcasting before and I am interested in the
issue).

What I said was that once you rise to a position of importance in the
software community (free or commercial though one may be) you have
some (moral) obligation to the user base. And I actually think Octave
acquits itself quite well of it.

> In practice, anybody who's asked for help with courtesy has always be
> treated politely. But the fact is that we're mostly a community of unpaid

In practice, I think that Octave is one of the better, more
communicative and more responsive open-source projects. No
disagreements here.

> has exactly the opposite effect). My reasoning is actually very simple: if
> you think a piece of software is a steaming pile of crap and their
> developers are a bunch of idiots, why would you use it?

In this case (as in may other), criticism is a form of flattery. If
the software was that  bad, it would be ignored. It is criticized
precisely because it is widely used and people see some possible
improvements in various parts of it.