These two points are very important. I've wanted to make Octave a business, but I just never knew how to start. I tried to find people who would help us get started, but the only ones I could find wanted to either compromise Octave's freedom (e.g. sell non-free extensions) or wanted some kind of way of turning Octave into a giant billion-dollar business very quickly.
I couldn't find anyone who could help us do something like run a small business or just help us figure out how to sell those useless stooge licenses I keep hearing companies want to buy instead of sending donations.
I had no idea what I was doing. I found a local lawyer who incorporated me for $1000. He wrote the commercial license for my software for another $750. I had a friend who was a CPA and taught me how to keep books. I was terrified but literally every business is started this way.
Need help? Walk outside your house and ask the five nearest businesses who they use for legal and accounting. Talk to a professional.
I'm also happy to chat about starting an OSS business during my weekly happy hour, all welcome:
I'd also just like to call positive attention to the bravery and openness Mike has shown by publishing his revenue/business numbers (which maybe some would hold as precious private information). He's been very open in hopes of inspiring and giving back. It's not just the code that he's open sourced but a path and pattern. This is pretty special in the best use of the word.
This is exactly why I disclosed my revenue: people won't know there's a successful path forward unless it's disclosed. I want more OSS developers to follow my lead and build a bright future for themselves based on their awesome software.
I'm an Octave fan. I generally prefer it to Matlab, and do my daily scientific computing in Octave. To me, the biggest threat to Octave is SciPy/NumPy. The students I work with all prefer those libraries. I haven't switched largely because of my own custom libraries and because the the Octave syntax is more appropriate for numerical work.
One possibility: Find a company that buys a ton of Matlab licences in order to get access to a specific library. Implement that library well, GPLed, for a price that is below their annual license cost.
It's a tiny niche (big company, small library), but if it can be found, it is one the Octave team could do well. Everyone, except Mathworks, would win.
Proprietary libraries do offer sponsoring companies greater competitive advantage, but the first mover to a cost savings is already a winner.
Getting a long list of big Matlab customers is a place to start. Sometimes they boast about the biggest fish in advertisements.
If running out of money is a critical problem for Octave development, make finding GPL revenue the core goal. Octave is now complete and capable enough that it can take care of itself for a year with bugfixes alone.
Matlab is still huge. As long as there's a need to run Matlab scripts, there's a need for Octave. The non-Matlab free alternatives aren't really competition for Octave. We're not short on users or developers. We're short on money.
The first possibility has been attempted. In effect, that's partly why the GUI happened: a company really wanted it and paid for its development. jwe has been able to coast on this kind of gig for a while, about 8 years now. It's just that it's never been a very financially stable thing.
The rest of your suggestion seems to be about running a business. That's the thing we've just never really known how to do. There are a lot of business details that we've never really figured out because we'd rather be writing code.
as mperham said (i use sidekiq btw), once you know how you want to charge people (license, support, book, conference, whatever) the mechanics of going about it on the business side are pretty straightforward. you need to set up a legal entity (corporation or LLC), get a bank account, and set up a (e-commerce) store front somewhere.
the nice thing is that octave is established enough that you won't need to do a lot of marketing to develop awareness of the product, which is usually the hard part. you also have some validation for your product (a large and successful competitor and a bunch of support contracts for octave). it sounds like, instead, the hard part for you is figuring out what you want to sell and getting going. people seem willing to help, so take them up on the offer! i'm also happy to lend an ear or a hand if need be. good luck!
Every project has to determine their own path to sustainability. Knowing only what I've read here, I'd sell support in seat packs, e.g. $1000/yr for every 250 users. A good sized university might have 1000 engineering students and $4000/yr for a critical tool used by all their classes seems reasonable.
The great thing is that you define support however you want. 24/7 phone? Email during business hours only? Just make it clear to the customer so expectations are properly set.
A business might only have 10 people that use a tool like Octave but $1000/yr isn't a big deal if that tool is necessary for their daily work.
Businesses simply need to get the proper invoices. By all means do enough work to make that visible and easily obtainable for them if you want to get any money.
Still, the money from what you call "useless" licenses is minimal compared to the one that the businesses are ready to pay if they don't have any other alternative but to pay. Business are the systems that are designed to make profit. If they don't have to pay, they typically won't.
At least in Indiana, starting an LLC takes about 15 minutes online, filling out a form. Then you go to the IRS web site and get a tax id for the new LLC. Then a business account at any bank, under the LLC's tax id. This can all be done in 1 day. I'm not intending to be critical, but rather pointing out that you don't need to pay a lawyer or accountant to incorporate.
The key thing after that is to separate your income and expenses into personal and company. Never mix funds. Get a separate company credit card. You'll probably have to start out using the LLC's bank debit card - that's fine.
I couldn't find anyone who could help us do something like run a small business or just help us figure out how to sell those useless stooge licenses I keep hearing companies want to buy instead of sending donations.