I sat by and watched the previous thread develop with disbelief but without saying anything, so let me say it now. In the last thread there were a lot of negative comments from Nathan and many others trying to reason with him: Nathan against the world. I hope that this is not going to be repeated here as I thought the whole thread was very destructive. I like Nathan: he's a nice guy and he contributes a lot of sage code but I also know that these threads have turned quite a few people away from sage. I suggest that we agree to disagree and spend our energy on something more important.
Regarding the SMC project, as far as I can see it uses SAGE, legally under the GPL, and it fully acknowledges all of the contributions from the sage community. Moreover, William has aid that any income generated by the company will be used to fund further development. I'm happy with that. The reality is that sage is currently struggling. I have spent quite a lot of time writing sage code. If sage suddenly disappears all of the time that I have spent on sage will be lost. So it is very much in my own interests for SMC to take off because if it works then my code will be viable for longer. I am fully supportive of the SMC and William's efforts to get it up and running. Andrew On Friday, 26 February 2016 18:51:20 UTC+11, Nathann Cohen wrote: > > Hello William, > > I don't think that I disagree with any of the goals you aim at for Sage. I > certainly don't see anything wrong with your involvement in seeing it come > true. I don't see anything wrong in the way you embrace the problems you > meet on > the way and try to address them. > > My main complaint about it all, is that you seem to think about it as if > you > were still alone in the task. So alone that those who have been developing > it > since you stopped are hardly part of the picture you drew (and that's many > persons, and that's many years). Two problems that I see: > > 1) You expect people to participate to a task, but make by yourself > decisions > which involve all of them. Sometimes without informing them, least of > all > discussing the plan with them. > > 2) So doing, and because they are not part of the story, you overlook that > they > could also help better toward what seem urgent to you: they could, if > you > involved them more. > > It's like you delegated development to the people here, and now have your > hands > free to do whatever you think needs be done. And so doing, people here who > contribute to sage (and who grew an interest for turning Sage into the > perfect > math software -- all sides of the question considered) are not invited to > step > on this second terrain, where you still seem to think as if you were alone > against the world. > > About your short description of me: be fair. I do not even understand what > you > mean by 'academic use only' (and I'm fine with the GPL) but yes, I would > prefer > all decisions to be taken democratically. Even the non-technical > decisions. Having sagemath.com redirect elsewhere than sagemath.org was > one of > them. Creating a for-profit company with the same name as the software was > another. > > "With idealistic goals of purity": be fair. I request more democratic > decisions, > and if there is *anything* you can grant me it is the very clear knowledge > that > my opininions are not always shared by everybody. When I ask for more > democratic > decisions, I am sharply aware of the differences. But more democracy, > indeed, > would be an improvement. > > "it's ethically wrong to make a release of Sage with known bugs!": be > fair. I > fixed too many of them to believe that I never add any, or that none > remains. What was ethically wrong in the instance you are apparently > refeering > to was the *removal of a warning* from a code that we knew returned wrong > results. > > Finally: I don't see this project achieving the aim you defined without > somebody > like you. You have the devotion, the energy, the talent. As a human > being, however, I find it hard to contribute to Sage if you see it as a > relatively unimportant subtask of a bigger plan over which the > community has no claim. > > Have fun, > > Nathann > -- 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.
