William wrote: > > Was the idea of Wiris using Sage as an additional calculation engine > > for their client discussed at all? > > No. Wiris is a commercial company > and I got the very strong impression that they view Sage as basically > potential competition whose mere existence is bad for them. In fact, > they're right to be worried, since there have been discussions > on sage-devel about modifying Sage > so that it could be rolled out in France/Spain for high school and college > use -- and that is _exactly_ the current market of Wiris. I definitely > suggested various times opportunities for collaboration, but I don't think > they > were interested at all and would rather we just didn't exist.
This is what I suspected happened. The reason I bring this up is that I was just about to create some marketing materials which stated how much more powerful Sage was than a scientific calculator, and how people should seriously consider using Sage instead. I acquired a TI84 calculator recently and I was going to use it to show how Sage could absolutely run rings around it at a far lower cost. But then it came to me that instead of making TI an enemy, what I really wanted to see happen was for TI to embrace Sage and find ways to give their customers an enhanced level of service with it. TI might lose calculator sales to Sage in some areas, but if Sage is able to increase the use of mathematics in the world by, say, 5%, this should also expand the market for calculators which should benefit TI in the long run. TI should also be able to find other ways to make money with Sage. The reason this idea came to me was that I have followed Sun Microsystems very closely from about 1998 to the present and I watched how the open source community applied steady and relentless pressure to them during this period until they were transformed into an almost completely open source company. The transformation is so complete that they are even open sourcing their chip designs now and an increasing number of their upper-level managers are open source "rock stars". The way that you and Tom describe Wiris' reaction to Sage and the idea of collaboration sounds very similar to Sun's reaction to open source before their transformation. What I am thinking is that, if an arrogant company like Sun can be transformed by open source, then companies like Wiris and TI can be transformed too with enough persistence. > I was also pretty soundly criticized by someone else at the Wiris booth for > (1) > not using OpenMath/MathML for communication between different components > of Sage, and (2) for not having an OpenMath output / input format for every > Sage object. I'm not really interested in starting a discussion > about this here > on sage-devel -- all that OpenMath stuff is nice in theory, but it doesn't > have > much to do with the sort of problems Sage is built to solve. With Sage the > goal is to create the best system we can using when possible very good > existing tools -- and the question is how best to do this. OpenMath doesn't > fit in at all for that problem. It may be very relevant for other > problems later on; > I don't know. The LaTeX --> OpenOffice translator I have been working on has forced me to think about LaTeX and MathML quite a bit and I think a separate thread on this topic would be interesting. Anyway, while I was researching translators, I located the following python program that translates LaTeX to MathML. Perhaps it would be useful to add to Sage?: http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/tkosan/misc/latex2mathml.py [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~/hp_backup/tmp/scripts/scripts $ python latex2mathml.py "\frac{{x}^{2} }{7}" <math xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML'> <mfrac><msup><mi>x</mi><mn>2</mn></msup><mn>7</mn></mfrac> </math> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~/hp_backup/tmp/scripts/scripts $ python latex2mathml.py "{{{3 \cdot \sin \left( a \right)} \cdot b} \cdot {e}^{\frac{4}{c}} }" <math xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML'> <mrow><mrow><mrow><mrow><mn>3</mn><mo>â </mo><mi mathvariant="normal">sin</mi></mrow><mrow><mo minsize="1">(</mo><mi>a</mi><mo minsize="1">)</mo></mrow></mrow><mo>â </mo><mi>b</mi></mrow><mo>â </mo><msup><mi>e</mi><mfrac><mn>4</mn><mi>c</mi></mfrac></msup></mrow> </math> Ted --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
