On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 8:13 AM, Martin Albrecht <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Estimate of number of Sage users by year: > > > > Feb 2005: 3 > > Feb 2006: 100 > > Feb 2007: 500 > > Feb 2008: 5,000 > > Feb 2009: 10,000 (Goal) > > Feb 2009: 25,000 (Goal) > > Feb 2010: 100,000 (Goal) > > Feb 2011: 1,000,000 (Goal) > > Hi, > > I wonder what the status of this goals is. Is it something we all should > strive for? I guess at the end of the day we all have our own agendas because > Sage is a volunteer driven project but still I am unsure what these goals > mean. To be more specific, I am not sure that I'd aim for 10^6 Sage users.
Just to clarify, the mission statement of the Sage project is: "be a viable alternative to Maple, Mathematica, Magma, and Matlab (ASAP)". Since those systems (except Magma) all *do* have over a million users, and all of those systems costs > $1000, I think it is highly unlikely that we can genuinely say that we have really achieved the above goal if Sage doesn't also have a million users. To reiterate, the goal is certainly *not* to have a million users. It's the goal listed above. One measure of whether Sage has truly succeeded at that extremely difficult goal is the number of users. I'm not screwing around; I really want to achieve the goal in quotes above -- the issue is just that it is quite vague, so it is useful to have some concrete measures of what it means. > As > William pointed out already this would mean a lot of maintenance and > infrastructure work. Also, I doubt that there are 10^6 mathematicians out > there in need of a mathematics software for their research Sage is not just aimed at research mathematicians. > so I figure by > seriously(!) aiming for way more users than research mathematicians Sage's > slogan would need to drop the "viable alternative MAGMA". Huh? Why??? That just doesn't make any sense. > You don't get 10^6 > users with a sophisticated modell of p-Adics but you might get them with > flashy graphics. Sure we can do both but this is not represented in these > goal figures. Or in other words: I am willing to sacrifice this massive > growth for "critical peer acclaim". If we'd really aim for > maximum "marketshare" we might miss the point where we could have created a > viable open-source alternative to Magma a major contribution to the > mathematical sciences. In my book research papers citing Sage are a much > better benchmark. Your goal is to create a viable open source alternative to Magma, and if that were achieved you would have succeeded. That's a reasonable goal, but it's not the goal of the Sage project, which is to be a viable alternative to Maple, Magma, Matlab, and Mathematica. > To avoid misunderstandings: I am not against 10^6 users, it is just not my > goal. > > Thoughts? Your goal is not the same the as the goal of the Sage project; it's only 1/4th of the goal. > From the ivory tower ;-) Indeed -- ivory tower :-). For a number of different reasons, the more modest goal of just being a viable alternative to Magma is actually harder long term than the goal of being a viable alternative to all four systems. I would have to write a lot to explain this, and I can't write now since I just got up and I'm hungry. Anyway, here's a quick analogy though. Imagine if Firefox were an extremely good web browser but it *only* worked for browsing web sites about mathematics. I probably wouldn't use it, and I seriously doubt Google would be giving Mozilla $50million (or whatever) a year to develop it. There is an old quote here from Dec 2005 in which Richard Fateman declares Sage "essentially doomed": http://sagemath.org/misc/fateman_on_sage.txt It suddenly seems kind of relevant. -- > -- > name: Martin Albrecht > _pgp: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8EF0DC99 > _www: http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb > _jab: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > > > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
