Seems like some people forget that, you have to play the game in order to be successful. The game could broadly be described as: navigating the framework of society. That framework whether you like it or not, is and likely will continue to be composed largely of money.
The game consists for everyone, as we all play it, and of anything really, buying milk at the grocery store, making a product successful/popular/accessible etc, there are boundaries and limits that as mentioned, are usually monetary in nature. Hopefully this makes sense so far lol. One of the limits that Sage has encountered against so far, as William explicitly points out, is money. Sage MathCloud (SMC) among other things, makes Sage more accessible to people as no local installation is needed, among other benefits. The barrier to entry to having access to a world class piece of mathematics software, is incredibly low with SMC. Back to the game side of things, all the benefits of SMC came and and continue to come at a cost, the servers and infrastructure cost money. That's easy to forget if you use SMC just as a black box sort of thing. But how else would you do this without cost? Make some sort of distributed Computer Algebra System or something? There is no way else, there will always be a cost, money, in trying to acheive Sage's Mission: *Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab.* William even explicitly mentions having to play the game in his blog post. If you don’t play the game, you lose. Just as an example, since it Magma gets brought up alot, as per Magma's Website: Availability of a student version > > A student version of Magma is available. The only difference between it > and the full version is that the memory usage is restricted to 150MB. The > student version is now *only available* through *educational institutions*. > See (ii) — (iv) below. > > We regret to announce that the supply of a restricted version of Magma for > a small price to students enrolled at a college or university has been > *discontinued* for the time being. The costs associated with distributing > and supporting the student versions have become far greater than the income > received from student licences and we are not in a position to > cross-subsidise these costs. > > ... > Developing countries > > Users from newly industrialised and developing countries may apply for > Magma licences at a reduced rate, by special agreement. > I have no idea what Magma's Mission is, and it doesnt matter, as im not comparing/contrasting them here, i just post that from their website to show people, detractors/haters of SMC that theres others in the game as well, trying to achieve whatever their goal is, but bound by same limits as sage, money. Sage's Mission, its goal, is lofty, so if your a person that loves sage but hates all or just some of SMC, then your free to never use SMC and can just view it as *playing the game*. On Tuesday, August 19, 2014 2:35:13 AM UTC-7, Nathann Cohen wrote: > > About William's blog post (*): even though I don't like you do much (but I > don't like what a lot of persons do, so apparently there is nothing wrong > in that), I was wondering about your plans. If you ever end up earning > money with this for-profit company you have in mind, who would you hire to > write Sage code ? > > What I mean is that I feel "safe" when I write graph code, but that I am > afraid of touching group stuff, or categories. I would not dare writing any > statistics-related stuff (it was too long ago), nor differential equations, > nor symbolics... > > Well, not anything else, actually. And so I felt that one perso can write > code for his specific domain, and not for a lot of other things. > > Sooooooooooo I wondered. Where do you think you could find guys able to > work on Sage who you could hire for a long time, i.e. with in mind that > they have several years of work ahead of them, probably on different > mathematical topics. > > Even though I guess you also want to expand non-mathematical parts of > Sage, i.e. some infrastructure, or support on new platforms, things like > that. > > Just wondering. > > Nathann > > (*) It made me laugh at first. Recently our former president Nicolas > Sarkozy was arrested because of one of the 9999+ procedures against him > (like hundreds of others are, daily). The following day, he was at prime > time on the TV explaining why he did not deserve any different justice than > the one given to any normal citizen, and why everything against him was a > conspiracy. "Most other persons" can't do that. It made me laugh because > you answered a sage-devel thread on a blog. > -- 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/d/optout.
