Nathan, you started this thread with words like, "....help william earn more $$ than he has now ".
You are making a claim here, that William is personally making money for himself from Sage. If you make the claim, it is up to you to prove the claim. So, what is your evidence that William is now paying himself money from SageMath Inc on top of his salary at the Uni of Washington? If you don't have any evidence of this, you don't have a right to make such complaints. Secondly, as you have worked out by now, SageMathCloud is not Sage. SageMathCloud is a generic service for running Sage, R, Julia, writing PDF's collaboratively, and running a huge variety of other open source software. I personally have and pay for a SageMathCloud account. I have never used it, as far as I can recall, for running Sage. I have extensively used it for writing pdf's and have used it for running Julia, Flint and other things I work on. Now I will admit you have two valid points: 1) Sage is one of the pieces of software that can be run on SMC. The better Sage is, the more students will use Sage, and some of those users will use SMC. Some of them, or more likely their professors, will pay for SMC accounts. So improving Sage will very indirectly help increase the revenue SageMath Inc makes. So you are right on this point. 2) SageMath Inc is William's company, even if he isn't currently paid a salary by that company and even if he is currently still trying to make back all the money he lost on SMC while it was getting started. But conceivably, SMC eventually does well enough that SageMath Inc might make enough money to pay William more than he is currently earning. Definitely possible. Just not happening now. So you are right on this point at some level. So let's go with your two points and assume for now that your free work on Sage increases SageMath Inc's revenue, even if indirectly, and eventually the company earns enough to pay William a bigger salary than he currently gets. I think you should consider all of the following: 1) William started Sage more than 10 years ago, and put in many tens of thousands of lines of code. He applied for grants, ran workshops, supported developers, put his own time, expertise and money into the project. He made many sacrifices for Sage. 2) SMC is William's project. He's put a huge amount of effort into designing it, coding it, trying to get it funded, advertising it. It's been a huge fraction of his life for the past few years. He's also put a lot of his own money into it, and it's part of a strategy he has to fund further open source mathematical development. 3) Administering SMC is a huge amount of work for William. As the project grows very large, the demands on his time might just become greater and greater. 4) He might be able to one day pay you more money to work for him than your (really) crappy University salary. Who knows, SageMath Inc might really become successful, and William might actually be able to hire people. Who do you think he will hire? Homeless people with no coding experience? No. Like Google he will hire recruiters to ring you up every year and ask you if you want to come and work for the multibillion dollar SageMath Inc conglomerate. At what point do you say that William has a right to earn a crust from his effort? At what point has he earned the right to profit from his vision, investment, hard work? If he were running any other company on earth, he'd probably be making millions as a CEO by now. And yet people would seriously suggest he doesn't have a right to be supported from the very projects he initially created? No other company on earth works like that. My advice to you would be this. If you really feel strongly about this, do not contribute anything at all to SMC. Keep working on Sage and pushing it forward, but have nothing to do with William's company. Just work on the Open Source software you love, which William is NOT selling, and just refuse to have anything to do with the company William is running, which is making all the money for him. You can't possibly predict which will be the most successful software running on SMC. If William wasn't working so hard, it would probably be bitcoin mining software right now. Sage might not even exist when William is taking baths in pureed bank notes and caviar. And it certainly wont if people like you give up on it because William "Rockerfeller" Stein III might make a quid out of it. Just my $2m worth. Bill. -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
