| Octave core developer here. It is true that we have a lot of trouble attracting new contributors. Most of our users keep demanding features that seem to us unimportant but to them are all the world: a GUI ("whatever for?", we think. "Use a real text editor!"), a JIT compiler ("here's a nickle, get better vectorised code, kid"), perfect Matlab compatibility (a never-ending chase, not very fun, in which we must always be behind). Of these, we're finally slowly listening to our users. Two of our current three GSoC students are working on a GUI and a JIT compiler respectively. I have wild hope that this will attract more users and developers. I'm also currently hosting an Octave conference in a few days towards this goal: http://www.octave.org/wiki/index.php?title=OctConf_2012
By the way, Octave is GNU (so is R, supposedly), so we're not really open source; we're free. ;-)I don't know why Octave hasn't been able to replicate R's success. I don't know if R's not really being GNU despite in name has something to it (R developers routinely try to find new ways to get around the GPL and link R to non-free code, and I don't doubt that this linking to Oracle's database is another example of that). I don't know if it's just that a lot of people with big money care more about statistics and R than they care about Octave (banks and brokers for R, electrical and civil engineers for Otave). Maybe our code sucks more than R's. Do you have any suggestion how to make Octave the standard instead of Matlab? The recent gratis classes that emerged from Stanford gave Octave a lot of publicity. Do you have any suggestion of what else we might do? |