On Apr 30, 8:09 am, "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The "open source philosophy" is the entire reason for the > existence of Sage.
That may be true, but it won't sell. There have been other open source systems before Sage (Axiom, Maxima, ...) and very good specialized systems (Singular, CoCoA). These systems attracted a lot of development effort and made some very respected contributions to the field, however they did not achieve the base of users and developers that Maple, Mathematica, Magma, and Matlab (yes, count them) have. So the first thing the ISSAC audience will ask is "what makes Sage different?" I tried to suggest some answers to that question. > You seem to be anti-open source in your own work, > which is what *really* matters to you. It's my understanding > that you've written a very interesting library in computer > algebra and it is closed source. Correct me if I'm wrong, > but I have the impression you generally don't see the value > in *open source* mathematical software (per se), and > are mainly interested in Sage only for the technically > interesting successes it has had. Well that is a fair criticism because I haven't contributed any code. Setting aside philosophical arguments, I believe it makes technical sense for the field to adopt a common "infrastructure" that is open source. Look at the massive benefits we have all received from GMP. It has made every system better. Comparable projects for other low level operations in computer algebra could have a similar, although not as wide, of an impact. Whether you can convince people of this is another issue entirely. By the way, don't worry about offending me, I have been known to offer blunt unsolicited criticisms of others' work :) > > BTW, asking for contributors is the surest way to get zero > > contributors. > > I'm really glad I didn't listen to you over the last three years. To an audience of researchers and professionals it will sound desperate. There is no shortage of peoples' pet projects in this field, and everyone knows that software development is a massive time sink. They are mathematical algorithm researchers remember. I think they will be most interested in technical achievements, and in the unique qualities of Sage that could help them in their work. Feel free to ignore my advice, but I am offering it in good faith. There will be people at ISSAC who write open source math software (Singular, Pari, Maxima, etc), there will be some more people who use it, and there will be many more people whose exposure to open source might be limited to GNU/Linux and GMP. They are all there to talk about symbolic algorithms. That is the audience. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
