Follow-up Comment #3, task #6160 (project administration): Hi Stephan,
>How do you plan to use your Savannah account? first of all I need subversion server somewhere, it's better than CVS from sourceforge because allows to do atomic changes & renaming of files. >However, we do not allow to host your project on Savannah and SourceForge at the same time, if Savannah is just a project mirror. Your project development should happen primarily on Savannah. Ok, no problem. >There is a companion site savannah.nongnu.org where we also host Free Software projects that are not part of the GNU Project, but run on free platforms. I didn't understand what's the difference? Does hosting on gnu.org yields more profits than in nongnu.org? >A project name that says "open" will tend to lead people to think of the project as "open source" instead of "free software". >We would be glad if you accept to use "free" instead of "open" in your project name. >While Open Source as defined by its founders means something pretty close to Free Software, it's frequently misunderstood. For more information, please see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-.... Ok, so I visited your page, has read it carefully & find it to be very essential. On the other hand, 1) many people will treat word "free" to be not opensourse, just to be something like shareware, like, for example, many instant messengers with closed-code are. 2) Unfortunately, word "FreeOpt" sounds very UGLY (at least in Ukrainian), so some people, that could be interested in future in development and/or using the tool, will laughing and avoiding this one. 3)I already registered the OpenOpt in http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/ -the main web area, where free m-code for MATLAB (and GNU Octave) are gained Renaming of package is unavailable there. Unfortunately, no more then one updating of package is allowed (according to the web area rules), so I had to publish link, where my new versions with bugfixes & new features are available, & it reduced my downloading rating - now openopt users doesn't use mathworks link for download & it reduces my rate (btw I have 73 downloads for now (last 16 days since reliase 1st ver; those numbers are for last 30 days)). 4)Anyway, after reading the (brand)name of OpenOpt license ("GNU GPL") all questions about free/open will gone away. >We are careful about ethical issues and insist on producing software that is not dependent on proprietary software. So, now I have fixed some incompabilities with Octave & have OpenOpt version, that runs in the GNU Octave environment (unfortunately, graphics output isn't work in Octave yet, because they have some thoubles (some bugs) with connecting MATLAB-style plot() to GNUPlot). Anyway, area of commercial optimization packages is very big - lots of those ones cost some thousand dollars. For example, TOMLAB/CONOPT costs 24500$ (http://tomopt.com/tomlab/products/prices/commercial.php), and it's only one of the solver packages, that are included in the TOMLAB (3rd party commercial extension optimization set of packages). So, Octave - GNU analog to MATLAB - missed even fmincon() - the main MATLAB optimization routine! - which is used (according to my observing MATLAB-related forums) aproximately in 30-40% of optimization problems. Of couse, it reduses Octave spreading speed very much, so I guess GNU should be interested. BTW some our solvers, for example ralg, in some tasks are better than any MATLAB or TOMLAB solver. Now I intend to connect RSQP toolbox by Institute of Industrial Control, Zhejiang University (http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/loadFile.do?objectId=13046&objectType=file), which also is better than some commercial solvers. Of course, there are many free uncommercial optimization packages, but 1) almost all of them are written in C/C++ or Fortran, so compilation sometimes falls because of different OS & different compilers used; also RAD (rapid application development) is unavailable there - it requires many time to compile, to link, to catch bugs like segfault etc. 2)Of course, in 99% cases Octave or Python are slower than C/Fortran, but now, with implementing things like JIT accelerator (of already compiled, running binary code) this difference turnes to be very small. 3)Almost all of the free optimization routines are written either as a students' homework (hence the code is very poor) or as a accompanied software to scientific articles or books, so it has unconvinient interface for implementing into a project. Of course, graphic output is very poor or absent. 4)Potential users of free software dislike using packages that are hosted at links like www.msu.edu/optim/~researchers/bob_smith_79.html. Who knows - may be some error will occure in future in already implemented project, and who will fix the bugs, when link will become dead? 5)What about support: salaries in Ukraine are very small, so no much money will be required from OpenOpt users for consulting & assisting them in solving their problems. 6) more than half of them uses not 100% free licenses, and it requires to study license every time you download something. So, even adding "GNU " to the "OpenOpt" would turn customers to be much more sure in the product. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?6160> _______________________________________________ Message sent via/by Savannah http://savannah.gnu.org/
