Hello Karl-Dieter,
> As to the substance of Nathann's comments, most of this is really an
argument
> about the GPL, or rather about how many of the potentialities in the GPL
are
> acceptable to a given community around a GPL product
This interpretation of my comments, if this is what you proposed, could not
be
further from the truth. My problem is not legal.
After exchanging several emails with Bill Hart about all this, I was
laughing in
my bed yesterday at 2am. You will see, it's hilarious:
1) Bill gave me his picture of Sage's life. He knows William, and told me
what
he knows of how Sage was started. He told me of the people who were
around at
that time, their life and how hard they found it to get funding to work
on
open-source software. Basically, he gave me a picture of William's
attempts
since then to make Sage known, through getting funding there and there,
through academia through rich guys, through other grants, through SMC.
2) I told him what I knew of William: I never met the guy, and though I
started
working on Sage ~6 years ago my picture of sage is pretty much
William-free,
short of knowing that he started it. I don't remember [1] him entering
the
technical discussions of Sage or taking side for this or that design
choice. I don't remember working with him on any code, I don't remember
him
saying "I'll fix this" and "fixing this" later. Hear me well: since I
worked
in Sage, I always considered William as a historial figure [2]. There is
nothing wrong with him starting the project and moving to other things
later
of course, he just wasn't in Sage's landscape anymore.
And that's where the two visions clash. For Bill Hart, Sage's story is the
story
of what William Stein does to make Sage successful. For me, Sage is an
open-source software managed collaboralively by a community of volunteers.
In Bill's story, however, William's work on Sage never ended. It's like he
has
been trying all he could from the start, and still does. And on the way,
made
'choices he had to make' like trademarking Sage's name, becoming the CEO of
SageMath Inc., like creating SMC, like trying the two together in name and
purposes and even in the ads because to him [3] that's one and the same
attempt
to make Sage successful. All choices that you saw me complain about on this
forum.
That's where it becomes hilarious: I would never dream of doing anything
like
that without consulting everybody on sage-devel at every step. To me,
sage-devel
is how and where Sage is being 'managed', and led, and headed. On the other
hand, I never thought that William could have any specific claim on the
topic,
since to me he had simply never existed on the radars since as long as I
have
been here. At most, given what he did, he would have been listened twice as
much
as anybody else, but that's it.
In the picture I understood from Bill, however, it's as if William never
thought
that the people on sage-devel who maintain and develop this software could
have
any specific claim on the topic, since Sage is a software he created and has
been trying to push ever since. Thus, no need to ask for their opinion and
act
on any disagreement when it comes to create a for-profit company, to become
a
CEO of a company with this name, of managing SMC and making money with it
[4].
So, yeah. That's why I was laughing in my bed at 2am. To me it's like a 6
years
misunderstanding. And of course it's not about licenses. I never imagined
somebody could think that the collective and free efforts of dozens of
persons
across years were but a detail in a bigger picture, and could be as easily
ignored when it came to decide of how Sage was to be developed. In this
picture,
none of this work even exists.
Nathann
[1] Please guys, don't try to find a lost sage-devel thread from years ago.
I
said that I don't *remember* it, and that's all. I'm trying to convey a
general idea.
[2] Which does not diminish his past work, of course. Just means it's
something
from a past era.
[3] Yeah, I'm sorry but I am reduced to interpreting omens since this
conversation about him does not apparently deserve his intervention.
[4] To give you an idea: I wouldn't have seen anything wrong if William had
come
here to ask everybody to contribute *money* to start SMC as a group. I'm
don't know if I would have participated (no clue), but that would have
sounded like a natural step to me.
--
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.
