Regarding the mission statement, I'm a little bit skeptic one can build a viable alternative to Magma on one side and Maple, Mathematica, Matlab on the other side. Magma is a very specialized software that is probably unknown to most mathematicians, and almost certainly unknown in other scientific fields, while most mathematicians and many scientists in other fields have heard about Maple, Mathematica and Matlab. From my very little experience trying sagemath, the system seems to me to be more designed to be an alternative to Magma than to Maple, Mathematica or Matlab. Perhaps because it's fun to code something exciting related to your math research while it's not fun to write interfaces, fix bugs, support windows, write documentation targetting large number of students, code heuristics for nice solvers and antiderivatives... That's probably the reason why Maple, Mathematica and Matlab are commercial softwares: people doing the boring work want to be rewarded for that. And you can not expect to be rewarded by the math community, most mathematicians don't care about software production, about opensourceness, just look how the scientific editors make money with the work of mathematicians and scientists in general. I don't know if the opendreamkit will succeed doing the boring work, but I believe there are several obstacles: the proposed salaries, the career perspectives, the code long term support... It's safer to bet on one person who is dedicated to the software, but the size of sagemath is probably too huge to be supported by one person alone.
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