On 4 Nov 2014 19:16, "rjf" <fate...@gmail.com> >> Perhaps the mathematical community needs to have an open-access database of bug reports for commercial software. A discussion of the usefulness, legality, practicality, commercial benefits etc. of such a database could be interesting. > think it's > not the "mathematical community" that should do this, but the > "users of software XYZ".
What I think might be useful, to a fairly large number of mathematicians, and so a reasonable subset of the "mathematical community", is a database where anyone was able to report bugs in Mathematica, Maple, Macsyma and other commercial mathematics software. Similar to the the databases of several open source math packages including both Maxima and Sage, but with the commercial software package name being such a category. It would not be particularly time consuming to set such a database up, and probably one could get a significant number of bug reports. BUT I am not sure how practical it would be to get 1) User-errors closed as "invalid" 2) Bugs that get fixed change to "fixed" when a particular bug was fixed. With such a database outside the control of the software developers, it may genuinely useful. Errors such as the one found in Mathematica, could have been reported much earlier. That's the point I was trying to make, and perhaps didn't phrase it too well. I think such a suggestion could be usefully put in a response to the editors about the paper by the trio of mathematicians. Dave -- 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.
