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?
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. 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. - William -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- 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.
