2013/8/30, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com>: > On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 11:07 AM, XXX wrote: >> Hi William, >> >> I know you have had a long and interesting "history" with Magma. >> >> You're probably already aware of this but if you're not, apparently the >> Simons Foundation is now funding the distribution of Magma to qualified >> U.S.-based institutions: >> >> http://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/magma/simons/ >> >> >> Whether that means anything in regards to more competition for Sage, I >> don't >> know. >> >> At least that might mean more U.S.-based developers could use it to maybe >> compare any computational differences between Sage and Magma and work on >> improving the Sage code even more?
Whaow! > Sadly, I think the only impact will be to reduce Sage development > activities and interest in using Sage. This could thus harm options > for researchers outside the US. Access and price is a big motivating > factor for people using Sage, with Sage being open source often a > secondary criterion. I hope I'm wrong. There is something else in which Sage is better than other software: contribution of users. I had a little background in programming (and all mathemtical software available on my computers) when I started to use Sage. Quickly I was able to produce a patch which turns out to be integrated in Sage few months later. That to say: my code is reviewed and always up to date even if I do not use it. Moreover, when I will use it again it will be better because of other's contributions. I think this is a strong avantage of Sage. The other pro I see is the community of users. Though, I do not know how is it with Magma. > Last summer, I participated in a roundtable discussion at the Simons > Foundation in New York City, which was billed as being about > "encouraging the development of open source math and physics > software". The room was full of representatives of various such open > source projects. We came up with ideas and discussed things all day. > At the end of the day Simons came in, demonstrated a lack of knowledge > about open source software and unfortunately wasn't very interested in > listening to us, then said their (clearly pre-determined) plan was to > make Magma free to US institutions and also maybe have a software > prize. He can of course do whatever he wants with his power. But > the overall experience was *extraordinarily* frustrating (for me, and > probably others in the room), and prompted me to start work to create > a company to eventually earn money, which can be used to fund Sage > development. That's what https://cloud.sagemath.com is about. I think that the Magma exclusiveness proposed by the "Simons foundation" is much more nocive than the fact they do not support an open software... Cheers Vincent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
