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Octave and Gnuplot Coming To Android
New submitter MathIsTasty writes "Recently, it was announced on the Octave-maintainers list that a Kickstarter campaign has been launched to bring Matlab style numerical computations and graphing to Android via a 'more than' port of Octave and gnuplot. While I doubt it will be as successful as some recent games on Kickstarter, is this a reasonable way to fund free software development? Now, we just have to worry about people working on simulating solar irradiation while driving. Here is a good blog post about the project."
I have been a long time Matlab, but have always been frustrated with licensing issues etc.
So I have tried replacing Matlab with Octave and SciLab a couple of times, but they both feels more cumbersome to use.
About a year ago, I tried Python with the modules Numpy and SciPy, and it just completely smokes the competitors. It is much more enjoyable to work with, so people should really give it a go, it if hard work to get used to something new, but with Python, you will not be disappointed. You can get some nice inspiration of what is possible in the 3rd party documentation SciPy-Lectures:
http://scipy-lectures.github.com/
There is already Addi: http://code.google.com/p/addi/
What is exactly wrong with it? $50.000 isn't such a big money if you're living in the US or western Europe... Going with the arbitrary salary of $50.000pa for a programmer I don't think this too much to ask. The "free software" in my opinion should pay enough in itself so that the developers don't have to get employed by some random thickhead company but working for the public. Kickstarter, after all, is nothing else but a popular place for asking donations. Or am I missing something from your comment?
Now, we just have to worry about people working on simulating solar irradiation while driving.
Been there. I have an N900 that runs R, numpy, matplotlib. Handy for computing when I can't sit on the bus or subway.
They're effectively offering to port the software on commission. Not an ideal scenario, but the alternative is to wait around until someone with the experience and knowledge necessary is willing to do the work for free.
The kickstarter says that the project will continue anyway, but successful kickstarter funding money will accelerate the progress, enabling the developer to focus the time necessary to get the project done quickly. I think it's neat, and while many people will say that they're after free (as in free beer) software, if enough people can donate a few $$ I think it's a noble goal, and I think free (as in speech) software is more important. I've pledged a few dollars, and hope it gets the funds needed.
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Just because the disparate software is free doesn't mean getting them to work together requires zero work.
"I know guys: Octave runs natively in Linux, and Android is just Linux. This will be totally easy! In fact, I'll download the source files tonight, whip up a custom build script with one hand while downing a Mountain Dew with the other, and have it done tomorrow."
But as any Android developer will tell you, taking something that runs on a Linux desktop and getting it on Android - making it function properly, getting it to look good, and getting it to interface with the Android UI - it really hard, tedious work. Testing on all the different Android platforms out there alone could keep someone occupied for a year. Is it really so outlandish to ask for some money for the work? $50k will get you a quality software engineer for about half a year (salary + benefits + office overhead). It's not that much.
I may just donate for the hell of it - and I use iOS and Matlab on a daily basis.
I do have to wonder what would be the use of Octave or Gnuplot on a mobile phone. None at all, that I can imagine. A tablet, maybe, as a teaching aid... but then, why not a netbook?
Wait, what? I had gnuplot and octave on my N900. Two years ago. Gees, bit slow there android.
Bitter and proud of it.
I have quite a few useful little Octave scripts that would be neat to run on my phone. For instance RK4-integration of Newton's second law; just input the body forces, starting position and velocity, hit run, it calculates body trajectory in 2D or 3D as you wish. Or maybe you want to calculate the eigenvalues of some Hamiltonian you just thought up?
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