On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 12:47 PM, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Nov 9, 3:36 pm, Chris <chrisbel...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Is web based use athttp://www.sagenb.org/discouraged for regular use >> or considered ok? I'm guessing a local install will benefit me with >> faster responses? > > On the other hand, the *.sagenb.org farm is not *bad* for regular > use. If you are doing serious research stuff using tons of CPU, you > will want your own or a ssh connection to a machine with it; if it's > more like a calculator please just use sagenb. It really depends on > what you want to do :)
As the person who maintains *.sagenb.org... I encourage you to use it. That said, you're competing with many, many other people for resources when you use it, and I have put several limitations in place (e.g., memory and time limits), which you won't have if you install your own copy of Sage. The computer *.sagenb.org runs on is pretty powerful though (it's a 24-core machine with 128GB RAM). > After my annual license for Maple ran out I started searching for an > alternative and came across Sage. Time-limited software licenses are really annoying -- I wanted to test something involving Mathematica on my laptop *today*, and discovered that my annual license had run out as well. This was totally without warning, since I hadn't run Mathematica on my laptop in several months. > The local install is pretty easy on Mac and Linux. You could also set > up a server on site wherever you are, if you have an old box lying > around that could be set up that way. > > Regarding the downtime issue, there have occasionally been rumors of > someone or some organization starting a service which *would* > guarantee this and provide support. So far, that hasn't happened, but > see e.g. http://www.scribtex.com/ and http://webwork.maa.org/faq.html#hosting > for random-ish examples with other open source projects of interest to > mathematicians. I might do this. It might be at http://sagenb.com, though right now sagenb.com points to sagenb.org. Here's the "business plan". Probably, http://sagenb.com would appear almost the same as sagenb.org, except there would be Google (?) ads on the side of your worksheets, and the ad revenue would go toward paying for: (1) server hosting (probably Amazon EC2 or something similar), (2) an employee (or later, employees) to maintain and backup the servers (3) advertising that sagenb.com exists, which would strongly encourage as many people as possible to use http://sagenb.com. The advertising and landing page would explain that though sagenb.com generates money, that money is all given back to the community (see below). (4) hire employees to improve the notebook itself (fix bugs, implement features); there would be a firm commitment that *all* such work would be open sourced immediately and get included with Sage. As ad revenue increased, the number of virtual hosts and disk space would similarly increase, as would the resources for fixing bugs and implementing features. At some point, there would be a $X/year subscription version that would remove all ads, and increase space available to that user. There would also be a $Y/year university site license version. I imagine the above being done as a not-for-profit effort, so if somehow it brought in a lot of revenue (more than needed for hosting and employees), excess money would go to the Sage Foundation to support other Sage development activities. Under the hood, the above would be significantly different than what we have now. It can only happen if we successfully re-architect the notebook server further so that it can be easily scaled up *a lot*, using multiple computers, etc. Also, we would have to have much better monitoring in place to ensure that we can handle the load of many users. Security would have to improve a lot. There would be plenty to keep some people busy fulltime. That said, I don't see anything stopping me setting up http://sagenb.com to point to something with ads that is hosted at Amazon, and see what happens. It may be hard to motivate people (including me) to do the above, because it's not going to get said people rich. But it has the potential to make Sage a much more long-term self-"sustainable" project, which to me would be worth more than getting rich. It's probably not possible to get traditional venture capital for a not-for-profit plan like the one above, but fortunately I don't think that is critical, due to (1) the generous support the National Science Foundation is currently providing, and (2) private donations to the Sage Foundation. The main problem would I guess be if somebody else does the same thing right now for profit without giving back their changes, and captures the market. Since we don't use the Affero GPL [1] for the Sage notebook, it is legal for somebody to do a lot of customization work to Sage and notebook, create a web-app using this customized version, and give back nothing to the community, so long as they don't redistribute their modified versions publicly. This isn't crazy -- not so long ago, I had a major company (I won't say who out of respect) tell me they planed to do something like that. -- William [1] http://www.affero.org/oagpl.html -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-support+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URL: http://www.sagemath.org
