On 31 March 2010 17:59, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > If I don't either > > (a) get much more money in grants, > (b) have more volunteers willing to do (2) and (1), or > (c) start a company and sell Sage binaries that are more polished, > > then indeed Sage releases will likely never be as polished as > Mathematica, or even RedHat releases. > > Regarding (a), if anything, grant funding for Sage that would cover > costs like build farms, etc., has only gotten more difficult. > Regarding (b), somebody volunteer. Regarding (c), yes, the RedHat > model for selling GPL'd software has the potentially to (legally) work > -- we would provide source code for Sage for free, but all the > binaries would only be available from *us* to people who pay for a > support contract (redistribution of binaries would be technically > legal but discouraged). Maybe Kirkby wants (c)? > > I don't personally want (c). > > -- William
No, Kirkby (or David is most people call me), does not want all of (c). In particular distribution of binaries should be made available and sharing encouraged. But I see nothing wrong with selling support contracts, as long as free support is still available. I certainly was going to purchase wireshark support when I wanted some changes made to the software for commerical purposes. Using public support forums would simply not have been appropiate. People pay for support on Apache, which is open-source. People pay for support on Mathematica. Whether they will for Sage I do not know. I suspect perhaps not. Wireshark and Apache are in a good position of arguably being the best software of their type - there is nothing better available commerically or for free. Dave -- 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 To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.
