Peter Jeremy wrote: >>>> I think 10 years would be best. Any less than 5 is asking for trouble. >>>> Sure Sage >>>> makes a new release every couple of weeks, but as we see from recent >>>> discussions, not everyone wants to update every couple of weeks. > > I think both are unrealistic for a volunteer project. Instead of > looking at what Sun or Wolfram offer, look at what the large FOSS > projects offer. Mozilla Firefox is supported for about 6 months after > the following major release. For FreeBSD, the last version released > on each major branch is supported for 2 years after release (earlier > versions are supported for between 1 and 2 years) and deprecated > functionality will normally be retained for a complete major release > after the deprecation announcement.
Sage has a mission of creating a viable alternative to the expensive mathematical packages. To make a truly viable alternative, it needs to be on the same level as Wolfram Research. So, IMHO, we *must* look at what Wolfram Research do. The fact Sage and Firefox are both free, does not in my opinion we should be aiming to be a par with Firefox, but with Mathematica. The implications of not getting support on an old version of Firefox is considerably less of an issue than if your old Sage notebooks stop working. I believe Wolfram Research support deprecated code for a lot longer than what you are suggesting. >> I would add Solaris is also free. > > The initial operating system is. The support is definitely not free: > In order to access email/phone support or patches, you must have a > paid support contract. All security patches, and many other patches are available free. If a security issue was discovered now in Solaris 10, I'm pretty sure Sun would backport that to earlier releases. I downloaded a whole chunk (about 600 MB) of patches for HP-UX 11.11 the other day from HP's site. HP-UX 11i was released in 2000, so 9 years ago. >> I know some of you linux guys probably find Solaris a pain, but it looks >> like >> Oracle is going to be buying Sun for 7 billion USD. For a company to be >> valued >> at $7,000,000,000 they must have done something right! > > Oracle's CEO is also stating that Sun is losing massive amounts of > money - which suggests they aren't doing everything right. The > valuation is also what Oracle is willing to pay to prevent one of > its competitors gaining control of Oracle's most popular hardware > platform. Depending on who you believe, you get a very different story. Some say Oracle do not care about the hardware, and really only want MySQL as they see it as a threat to their database. You are implying Oracle want the SPARC hardware. I wish I could set up a company that supposedly looses money, then get someone to pay $7,000,000,000 for it! IMHO, Sage should be aiming to be more like the professional maths package, not itunes or Firefox. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
