On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 3:16 AM, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > On 24 February 2011 17:28, William Stein <wst...@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? > > People are going to make money from Sage. There is as you know a book > being published on Sage. Both the publisher and the author will make > money from it. Yet personally I see that as the best thing that could > happen to Sage. > > As for the issue I raised as support contracts, then the following > might be a method which would not irritate anyone, so has almost zero > probability of losing any Sage developers. Use the money only to > > 1) Pay for extra hardware. I don't know if you have UPSs, but that > would increase the uptime.
I have UPS's. It's important to note that purchasing hardware has a lot of overhead, e.g., support staff, electricity, space, air conditioning, etc. > 2) Pay for advertising Sage in maths journals, New Scientist, or if > deemed appropriate, anywhere where the 4 M's are advertised. a) Can somebody do some research on the actual costs of doing this? b) Is 2) something that will annoy anybody reading this? I could see somebody being annoyed that valuable Sage money is being spent on advertising. (I personally think advertising is a good idea.) > 3) Pay for targeted advertisements on Google - Mathematica, MATLAB, > Maple might be nice keywords. Can somebody do some research on the actual costs of doing this? > Do *not* pay any individual Sage developer or a mathematician to work > on some aspect of Sage, as that could potentially cause a bit of bad > feeling. Since many individual Sage developers have been paid to work on aspects of Sage over the years, I'm curious whether this has actually caused bad feelings. (Anonymous offlist responses are fine.) > One could sink an endless amount of money into advertising. > > Make the "accounts" public. State the number of contracts sold > (obviously not to who), and disclose how the money has been spent - X > to Google, Y for hard disks, Z for UPS's etc. This sounds nice in theory, but it has to be balanced with it being precisely what customers sometimes don't want. There is little advantage to them to having how they spend their money publicized; it might help their competitors. > Personally, I don't feel the amount of money raised would be huge. But > the fact commercial support was available, could make Sage more > attractive to commercial customers. It's a fact that the numerical/engineering aspects of Sage already have commercial support from Enthought (in the US, and other companies elsewhere, e.g., in France), and I've heard they are currently doing very well. > I believe if the money was not payed to any individual developer, then > other developers would not mind providing the support for no cost. > (Count me as one). > >> * 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. > > Personally I have no objection. Even a "Paypal donate" button might be > a good idea. I have to plug that we have a "donate" button already: https://www.washington.edu/giving/make-a-gift?page=make&Code=MATSAG Our might even be way better than a paypal donate button, because every donor gets a signed letter from University of Washington stating that their contribution is tax deductible. This won't matter for you (since you're in England), but for people in the US it's a potentially big deal. -- William -- 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
