Hi,
I substantially updated the 1-hour SAGE colloquium-style talk I posted earlier
today (thanks for the feedback). The slides (sfu.pdf) and worksheet are
at
http://sage.math.washington.edu/tmp/sfu/
---
The talk went very well. This was at one of the Maple development centers,
the very nice person who invited me (Michael Monogan) was one of the people who
started Maple in the early 1980s, and I had the impression that almost
everybody in the
room used and loved Maple. So the audience reactions and questions at the end
were interesting.
* There were several older people who were involved with Maple since
the early days,
who asked some interesting questions:
* Will SAGE be around in 10 years?
(Several people in the audience responded immediately
-- "yes", how could
it not be, it is hard to kill GPL'd programs.)
* How is it possible that SAGE can exist in the future
given all the *tedious* work
that must be done -- e.g., documentation, automated
testing, making
SAGE available to people, etc.??
(I answered that since specific work on SAGE is voluntary,
SAGE developers almost only do work on SAGE
that actually interests and excites them; the
questioner just shook
her head in utter disbelief and said it wasn't
possible. I also pointed
out that what some consider boring tedium -- e.g.,
writing the tutorial --
others really like doing -- e.g., David Joyner really
loves writing!)
* Another person explained why he thought that SAGE would almost
certainly become commercial within a few years, and that my dream
of having something free and open source in the long run is hence
doomed. He sited many examples to back this up of actual systems
like Maple, Maxima, Mupad, etc., that used to be free but became
commercial out of necessity.
I explained that SAGE becoming commercial only (like Maple)
is totally impossible because of the GPL and that the
copyright of
SAGE and its components is owned by hundreds of people.
Most of the audience consisted of students (many advanced
undergrads, some in
applied math and combinatorics), and they were uniformly enthusiastic about
SAGE, the notebook interface, and *JSMATH* (which they love).
My impression repeatedly, is that with SAGE it is best to focus as much
as possible on young people and new users, and not worry much about
old fogies. Older people have repeatedly seen generations of failures
with free math software, so I think some of them might be somewhat
jaded.
-- William
--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://www.williamstein.org
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