On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 2:35 AM, Erik Bray <erik.m.b...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 > :) >
I hope that you take the approach of refactoring and extracting value from Sage, in way that makes everything much more usable to the Python/open source community. A perfect example of this is Martin Albrecht's recently launched https://github.com/sagemath/cysignals If you could do something like that -- with native Windows support -- for many parts of Sage (e.g., the preparser would be easy), then you would lay a strong foundation for native Windows support, while at the same time making the useful/tested/debugged things we've done with Sage more widely useful. It's boring work, doesn't make Sage any more functional, and definitely doesn't result in research papers. But I think it would be very valuable. > 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. Thank you for your support. This is *exactly* the plan, and evidence suggests that there is a nonzero probability of success. -- William > > -- > 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. -- William (http://wstein.org) -- 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.
