I am pleased with what we have accomplished so far, but ready to take on something new. I never intended Octave to be a Matlab clone, nor am I really interested in creating such a thing, but that seems to be what many users of Octave want. I am finding it too constraining to try to maintain almost any level of compatibility with a proprietary product for which there is no standard. It stifles any creativity by the threat of future incompatibility. I see this is as a real problem, not just an imagined one.
Free software needs a vision beyond reimplementation of existing proprietary tools.
Those of us who are interested in free software tools must become leaders rather than followers, and I am optimistic that this can happen for numerical software. But I don't believe it can happen if Octave continues down its current path. Octave has been an interesting experiment, and has shown that, within the free software community, it is possible to do a lot with limited resources. I think now is a good time to step back, examine what we have done, and decide what is the best course for the future. I'm looking forward to helping to define and implement the next generation of free software tools for numerical problems.