I thought that Mark McClure's post on another thread raised some interesting issues, and that it was worth responding to, but it was so tangential that it deserves a seperate thread:
""" But William, just two days ago on sage-support you wrote: "Let's put Mathworks out of business." http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support/browse_thread/thread/b564... So I wonder, what is your true feeling on this matter? To be clear, I am not attempting to be inflammatory. I have been genuinely interested in Sage for a couple years and have used it for real mathematics sporadically. I could even imagine jumping into Sage development but I have been *very* put off by the outright hostile stance frequently expressed towards the commercial systems on the sage discussion groups. As I mentioned in my response on sage-support, The Mathworks has played a central role in the development of numerical software (both commercial and free) for many years. Thus, I really feel that your desire to "put Mathworks out of business" is misdirected, particularly in the context of your current grant proposal. Mark McClure""" I can't speak for William, who I suppose is the only person who can give an "official" Sage opinion, but I think my feelings on this might overlap with his somewhat. It is good for mathematics if there are multiple implementations of any sort of computational functionality, to check results at the very least. So it is good that Mathematica, Matlab, etc. exist. It is also preferable that the implementations are open, so that they can be examined carefully. Thus to the extent that commercial software "competes" with free and open software, I will root for the latter. I don't really think William meant what he said literally, at least in the medium term. Or at least it can be viewed less confrontationally: Sage could only put MathWorks out of business if it became the standard choice in a wide variety of engineering, scientific, and mathematical fields. We have a long, long way to go before this happens, so I interpret William's statement as a sort of cheerleading to inspire people who care about open and free software. Sage would be a tremendous success if we could put anybody out of business. It is a rather negative way to frame a positive goal though. When I began using Sage about four years ago it was for purely technical reasons. I had used Mathematica for 15 years, and I was quite happy with it overall. But I needed to do some computations that Sage supported and Mathematica did not (from bioinformatics and polyhedral geometry). As time went on, the fact that Mathematica was a closed system began to bother me more and more. Using it now reminds me of how once I quit smoking, the smell of cigarette smoke became more and more irritating. As you point out, I think MathWorks is less harmful in many ways than Mathematica for the culture of science, engineering, and mathematics. Matlab was started as a free teaching tool after all, and only later commercialized, so I think its corporate culture is healthier. For a project such as Sage, the competition is for hearts and minds. Most people in academia don't want to learn many different systems, they want a single tool for teaching and research. It is natural, as Sage developers, to wish that that single tool be Sage rather than anything else. Realistically, for the forseeable future the commercial alternatives will be in business and continue to innovate and improve their products. Trying to exceed their offerings is an ambitious goal that helps focus our efforts. Other Sage developers surely have a spectrum of other opinions. Some of them probably do feel antagonist towards MathWorks etc, others do not. I hope that doesn't turn you off of Sage. Its a large and growing community, so one can expect to disagree sometimes. Cheers, Marshall Hampton -- 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
