I don't relish the prospect of another article that essentially says, We love open source because (whatever you trot out as advantages).
People DO test and find bugs in closed source programs. For example, running them on cases for which the answer is already known (e.g. solving differential equations, finding determinants for structured matrices of some sort, predicting yesterday's weather.) And ATM's continue to dispense money even if the source code is secret (which I suppose it is... I don't know) There are questions in the encryption community that require open source, I think. (Security in Obscurity is not a good idea). But that's a small piece. So if you think you can write an unbiased paper, sure. Another fan-boy essay, not so sure. On Tuesday, November 4, 2014 9:54:51 AM UTC-8, kcrisman wrote: > > >> > I can see that there could be a number of follow up comments about >> > the article. But too much emphasis on Sage's ability to perform the >> > computation correctly would make it like a childish pi**ing >> contest. >> > >> > Agree. A reasonable article should >> > > Yes. > > >> > >> > a) give some overview over the algorithms involved >> > >> > b) talk about bug tracking and prioritization, stopgaps >> > >> > c) automated testing to prevent the same issue in the future >> > >> > > And presumably pointing out that while all such software (hopefully!) has > such things internally, in open source you can see it. > > > >> > There have been subtle bugs in determinants of integer matrices in Sage >> > before, e.g. http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/14032 "determinant() of >> > integer matrices of size in [51,63] broken". Open source doesn't make >> > Sage magically bug-free. But Linus' law applies: "given enough >> eyeballs, >> > all bugs are shallow". >> >> I agree with both of you. Given that a significant part of this article >> dwelt on the closed-source bug-reporting frustration, it might be even >> more interesting if the user was taken through an actual bug found in >> Sage, and the bug-reporting and bug-fixing process was described, >> emphasizing the open approach and the role the authors could play. I >> was disappointed with the original article's conclusions---it gave the >> impression that the best we could hope for in finding, reporting, and >> fixing bugs in mathematical software was that we might be able to find >> them in comparing the output of two different black boxes. >> > > Exactly why I passed the article on. > -- 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.
