On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 1:35 PM, David Joyner <wdjoy...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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.
True regarding Matlab -- in fact, it is already very hard for the scientific python community to get traction against Matlab at the University level, though I'm very impressed with the progress they have made so far. And since we're talking about foundations and their money here, it's worth pointing out that the situation regarding numerical computing is different -- indeed, the Sloane Foundation recently put very substantial monetary support behind development of the scientific Python stack (organized around IPython), which is really awesome. William -- 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.
