On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:54 PM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:44 AM, parisse >> 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... > > I agree. You can tell what ODK is supposed to do by looking at the > grant materials, which has precise deliverables and timelines. It's > lots of exciting non-boring work that got them the grant. ODK impact > will be very positive for open source math software, but won't solve > the hugely important "boring work" problem you mention above.
It won't outright solve the "boring work" problem, but it will help with it. For example, one of my main goals (I think) is to improve the Windows experience. I've already made some headway on that--I'm close to having a one or two click installer for Sage on Windows. Granted it involves a lot of overhead (Docker). But in the longer-term I intend to put a lot of work into fully native Windows support--the "boring" work that mathematicians don't want to do (but that's exciting to me as a software engineer in search of a challenge :) That said, ODK is only funded for so much time, so while it will enable progress it's not a fully long-term solution. If SMC can turn a profit (where I use "profit" in the loose sense of generating more cash than is spent on it) I hope its backers will see a case for putting more money back into Sage and related projects in the long term so that we can continue to improve the user experience. -- 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.
