On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 2:44 PM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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.
My 2 cents: Magma is losing customers left and right and IMHO this will have little impact. You know more than I do about this, but my feeling is the number of people who need Magma vs Sage is getting smaller every day. I think Matlab is more of a worry. If Simons were to give away lifetime free copies of Matlab (with the symbolic toolkit) to everyone in the US, I think it would be very hard for Sage to get traction at the university level. > > 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. -- 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.
