> With the full understanding that I'm pouring some gasoline into the flames > right now, I still say that everybody, including me and Nathann, have the > "right" to be mistaken.
It seems that I was mistaken indeed. As Miguel Marco noticed [1], my opinion on many things changed since an email conversation I had with Bill Hart, on which I reported [2]. As I said in [2], not knowing William at all (never met, barely exchanged emails) and seeing several things happen (SageMath trademark, SageMath Inc. for-profit company, CEO position, sagemath.com absorbing sagemath.org, confusions between Sage and SMC, money earned by SMC by making Sage available), I slowly got convinced that William may very well have his very own interests at heart. Of the kind that could lead me [3] to believe that I was working for free, for a for-profit company. Discussing with Bill Hart convinced me that *he* was convinced of William's goodwill. That's important for me, and made me doubt reasonably of this position. Even though I would prefer to hear William's opinion directly rather than having to reverse-engineer it from other people's opinion of him. Assuming William's goodwill I posted [3,4], which tried to explain his actions as a feeling of *major* distinction between Sage's development and Sage's 'mission statement': it convinced me that he could see Sage's development as an 'unimportant subtask' of the goal he aims at, which would in turn lead him to act as if we had no role to play in this story. I believe that Sage's developers have a *right* to be involved in whatever is being made in Sage's name: this includes the trademarks, the for-profit company, SageMathCloud, etc. The free volunteers who develop it cannot be just there to write code, and have no other say (no information, no consultation) when such things happen. Thus, I sent [4] as a request for a necessary democracy in all these points. Note that so far, I'm trying to figure this all out by talking with almost everybody and I am quite eager to read his answer to [4]. I am willing to go to great length to clear a misunderstanding about the intention behind the actions he took unilaterally (e.g. the *long* discussions reported in [2]), but so far that's only a reasonable doubt. His recent message [5] in which he says that he cannot make any claim that all the money earned by SMC will be spent on Sage, and the fact that he has partners (unknown to me) who will have a say on it, told me already that I was a bit too generous at times when giving the full benefit of the doubt. Nathann [1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sage-devel/P62HfBr4UnI/6RrltX64BQAJ [2] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sage-devel/P62HfBr4UnI/irMQIxVTBQAJ [3] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sage-devel/P62HfBr4UnI/0rfF5DcHBQAJ [4] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sage-devel/D8tF8Hqpr4o/7n5IKHSkBQAJ [5] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sage-devel/D8tF8Hqpr4o/DZvXzbG9BQAJ -- 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.
