On Thu, 2011-02-24 at 11:18 -0800, Tom Boothby wrote: > > I'm also curious about honest *opinions* about how people in the Sage > > community would feel about a company making potentially gobs of money > > selling support contracts? What balance between profit and giving > > back to the community would be appropriate? What services might be > > offensive, and what would be OK? > > For me, it all depends on what the company does with said gobs of > money, and who is at the helm. If some enterprising stranger starts a > company providing support contracts, that's their own business -- we > develop free software, and people are allowed to use it. But somehow, > if you (William Stein) were to start the company and profit from it, > the situation gets hairy.
Keith Geddes (Maple's version of William) had to choose between being part of Maple management and being a professor. He decided to be a professor. I've talked to him about it and it was not a simple decision on his part. You can be rich or you can be famous. Which one would you choose? :-) > > For example, if you were to start a company which was primarily > devoted to making you lots of money, that would kinda suck. If, on > the other hand, you devoted the majority of the profit to a good > cause, I'd be all for it. My definition of "good cause" here is > pretty loose, too: if you used the profit to (say) buy and operate a > server farm which replaced the public notebook, that'd be *awesome* in > my book. If the money went to an institute which pays mathematicians > to do research which is tangentially related to the interests of Sage > users, great. If Sage could follow the Redhat model I think this would be a win for the whole community. It would be great to see ANY kind of a funding stream for computational mathematics. Funding grants for general research questions (e.g. what is a general way to handle simplification?) would be great. > > If the money went to some Sage developers and not others, then I > foresee some big problems, though. I don't know how this would be > handled, and I assume that some people would get pissed off and leave > the project over it. On the other hand, it would be nice to be able > to hire talented programmers to do dirty work that current Sage > developers don't want to do. > > > For example: > > > > * I could see how some people might be annoyed if there were a Sage > > version of EPD (http://www.enthought.com/products/epd.php) that fully > > supported Windows (say), even though Sage didn't, and cost > > $199/license. On the other hand, perhaps a $199 Sage-for-Windows > > might be better than no-sage-at-all for Windows for free. > > Is this option GPL-compatible? > > > * I'm curious if something like sagenb.org, but with Google ads, > > would be offensive. I could see somebody starting a small business > > that is just public notebook servers that also have ads. > > Knock yourself out. If it was made obvious that sagenb.org requires > huge amounts of computing power and the ads enabled us to pay for CPU > time on a distributed solution, I'm all for it. On the other hand, if > the ads only make a few bucks a month, it isn't worth it. Free > services on the net have ads or are donation-driven -- people are used > to that. I'm thoroughly opposed to obnoxious flash ads, pop-ups, > etc., but text google ads are fine by me. It's going to be HILARIOUS > when we start seeing Mathematica ads on sagenb.org, though. > -- 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
