Re: I'm no longer working on Octave

[John Swensen]

On Apr 1, 2013, at 3:00 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> I've made my last change to Octave.  Unfortunately, it's not the great
> change I was hoping it would be -- you know, the kind of change that
> would get me inducted into the Hacker Hall of Fame.  Instead, it's
> just a stupid little change, and I did it in kind of a crummy way.  I
> reversed the terminal colors in the new GUI so that the text is black
> and the background is white on Windows systems.  I know, fantastic new
> feature, right?
> 
> I hate to leave things like that, but after pouring my heart and soul
> into the project for more than 21 years, I've had all I can take.  As
> I was checking in that last change it really struck me how pointless
> it all is.  I mean, who really cares what the terminal window colors
> are?  And why am I wasting what precious little time I have here on
> Earth changing them around?  It all really began to feel unimaginably
> silly.  And then I suddenly came to the complete and utter realization
> that I truly have no more patience for another bug report about how
> "sin(pi) is not exactly zero", or some other armchair quarterback over
> in the peanut gallery calling me and other hard working Octave
> developers names like "kindergartners" because we sometimes make
> mistakes.  All I can say is, "is anyone perfect?"
> 
> As far as I can tell, all anyone really wants from the Octave project
> is an exact clone of Matlab with a price tag of zero.  We've tried for
> more than 20 years to explain the importance of software freedom, but
> no matter what we do or say, people are still squarely focused on
> Octave's missing features and the relative pricing structures.  It's
> crystal clear to me now that freedom doesn't matter one iota, and a
> price of $0 is not low enough if there is even ONE bug or missing
> feature.  So I say screw it, this whole software freedom thing is just
> an aging hippy fantasy anyway.  I honestly do not know what those
> people are smoking.
> 
> For those of you who will, no doubt, continue to work on Octave
> anyway, there's probably nothing I can do to dissuade you from your
> folly.  So I suppose I might as well wish you the best of luck.  But I
> beg of you, please don't contact me asking for help.  I really want to
> put this 20+ year long nightmare behind me as quickly as possible.  To
> that end, I've written up some quick notes about what I'm thinking of
> doing next.  If you are at all interested, you can read them here:
> 
>  http://jweaton.org/future-plans--is-there-any-other-kind.html
> 
> jwe

Behind every lie, there is usually a nugget of truth. Let's be honest, making 
seemingly insignificant GUI changes really does seem like a waste of time ;)

John Swensen