On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 11:18 AM, Tom Boothby <tomas.boot...@gmail.com> 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. > > 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.
Even if someone made gobs of money for themselves off of Sage, that might be OK as long as it was a net positive for the community (including lost opportunity cost). Of course the more the community benefits, the better it is in my book. I'm still not sure where I stand on all of this, but I think I'd be comfortable with a non-profit with some paying customers that uses the proceeds to make Sage better. > 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? If they had to modify Sage to do it, they would have to (to be GPL-compliant) release their changes. It's unclear if GPLv2 would prohibit someone from, say, getting a VMWare license and then selling working, well-integrated VM-ware appliances, perhaps with some custom code and scripts + Sage + Linux all in a closed, clickable .exe. They could then point you to (or even host) the Sage and Linux sources without giving you a way to reproduce or permission to copy their product. (That may be in the legally gray area, and certainly in the morally shady area, but its' a possibility). Fortunately, I don't see that as very likely. In terms of selling licenses, there are people who will pay licenses for something free, e.g. a university might want to support Sage development but they can't contribute to the Sage foundation directly, but they do have a software budget that is set aside for license purchasing. >> * 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. I can just see that now. "Peruse the ads to the left to fund your computation..." :) In terms of the OP's question, I don't have a problem over someone forming a company and selling Sage service contracts, as long as they do it in such a way that doesn't tarnish our image. This is hard, as they would have to be super knowledgeable about Sage, and most (all?) of the people I know who could fill this role already have very busy lives. I'm also fine with someone paying to have some feature implemented, especially if it's some "undesirable" task that would be beneficial to all but no one is doing, but picking who can get a bit political. In short, I'm +1 on making it possible to spend money to make up for lack of time, expertise, etc. but -1 on producing a product that is only available to paying customers. It would also be really sad if someone stopped offering free advice/contributions because they now found a way to get paid for it. - Robert -- 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
