Written interview floss4science.com

[floss4science]

Hi.

Gary Schafer recommended I email to this list my interview proposal.

My name is Edwood Ocasio and I am the founder of http://www.floss4science.com,
a site about open source software in science and engineering. I will
like to publish a written interview with you about FreeMat as a
featured post in floss4science.com

I worked for 20 years as a professor of computer science, mathematics
and statistics in different universities in Puerto Rico. You can
easily find traces of me on the web. I also have a group for an
Spanish speaking audience interested in open source software for
scientific computing (http://groups.google.com/group/compcilibre).

* The interview publishing process *

1. I will send you a private link to drafts of the interview before
publishing it to allow you to make corrections.
2. Your photo and/or screenshots of your software can be included. The
photo is not a requirement.
3. Interviews will be queued for weekly publishing. I will notify you
the expected publishing date.


* Interview license *

This interview, as all content in floss4science.com, will be
distributed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/
3.0/)

Below are the questions. You can answer them right here and just
reply to this email.

You can leave questions unanswered if they do not seem to apply to you
or FreeMat or cannot answer for whatever reason.

Again, thanks.



====== INTERVIEW QUESTIONS ======

1. Please, give us a brief introduction about yourself, i.e.
profession, workplace, projects, etc.

2. What is FreeMat?

3. Why and when did FreeMat came to be?

4. In which [language(s)|platform(s)] is the project developed?

5. Does FreeMat have sponsors (private, academic, other)?

6. How are the sponsors supporting the project?

7. How many users you estimate FreeMat have?

8. Do you know where is FreeMat used (corporations, universities,
other)?

9. How many team members does the project have?

10. In what areas of FreeMat development do you currently need help?

11. How can people get involved with the project?

12. What features are in the roadmap?

13. Which projects, blogs or sites related to open source software for
science can you recommend?

14. Why do you consider free/libre open source software important for
the advancement of your field?

15. Is there any other topic you would like our readers to know about?

16. Where people can contact you and learn more about FreeMat
(website, blog, email, twitter, identi.ca, Facebook, etc.)?


Thank you for sharing with us more about you and FreeMat.

===========

[Timothy Cyders]

Edwood,

I can't necessarily speak for everyone, but I can put up a start on answering some of your questions. For your reference, the ultimate head honchos here are Samit and Eugene.

1.) I'm a Doctoral Candidate at Ohio University in Mechanical Engineering - I've worked in a lot of different sectors (manufacturing, testing, product design, management), and I teach basic design and statistics. I'm currently working on a new type of continuously variable transmission, focusing on simulation for design. I've done a lot of simulation for other jobs over the years (as well as my Master's degree), all of which have been done in FreeMat.

2.) FreeMat is an open-source programming and simulation environment similar to MATLAB. The programming language and workspace work very much in the same way as MATLAB as far as the user is concerned - matrix operations and manipulations are the forte, if you will, of the environment's power, but looping is now very fast when the included JIT compiler can compile the looped code into binary. This, with advanced plotting and visualization capabilities, make FreeMat a widely-accessible, free-as-in-freedom platform capable of very advanced simulation. Users familiar with MATLAB will find that FreeMat presents the most similar open-source environment to MATLAB, as programs like SciLab and Octave have significant differences in their details of operation.

3.) This is best left to the main guy, Samit.

4.) FreeMat is primarily programmed in C++, using QT as a gui front-end. Many of the environment's functions, though, are written as m-files in the Freemat/MATLAB language.

5.) FreeMat is supported by none other than those of us who are excited enough about the program to be active in its development/maintenance. To my knowledge, we have no sponsors of any type.

6.) -

7.) I'm not precisely sure of how many users FreeMat has, but the Windows version of the latest release (Windows constitutes the majority of our usership, to my knowledge) has been downloaded nearly 77,000 times.

8.) As I recall, FreeMat has been used at multiple universities by both students and faculty, and by people working in the private sector in many different capacities. Personally, I use it for my research at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, as well as for teaching programming to my students - for most simulation tasks, MATLAB is such a hassle to deal with in terms of licensing and speed (or lack thereof), FreeMat is a much better solution for me. I have also used it in a good number of private contracts. As I recall, FreeMat was being actively integrated into curricula at Georgia Tech as well (as of a year ago).

This is as much as I've got time to write at the moment. I'd be happy to send along some graphics and simulation examples if you're interested. All, feel free to call me on anywhere I've said something incorrect.

TJ

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[floss4science]

Thanks Timothy! I think that we can write this as a team interview,
like the it was done with the SciRuby team:

http://www.floss4science.com/interview-sciruby-team/