"You will have to close source and commercialize Sage. It's inevitable" Michael Monagan, cofounder of Maple, to William Stein.
Sage is a computer algebra system led by William Stein, originally in the area of number theory but branching out to include other systems including Axiom at one point. I've quoted from his post http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-is-sagemathcloud-lets-clear-some.html Stein tried hard to duplicate Magma, a large computer algebra system. By his own admission, Sage has failed. Consider this as an example of what will happen when Magma disappears, an inevitable event by my own reasoning. There is no funding source for open source computational mathematics. I've tried with government, university, and commercial sources. Stein had a Google grant and university support but it was not enough. Without the university connection even Google wouldn't fund him. The area of openly available computational mathematics is a love-it or leave-it situation. I'm 14 years into the love-it side but I understand why most people choose leave-it. Large systems like Axiom are mind-bendingly complex to maintain, modify, and extend. It is even a challenge to document obscure implementation details. Do you really want to spend your nights, weekends, and vacations debugging p-torsion bounds on elliptic curves? And do it for free? Or fix up a broken port to Fedora because the NSA SELinux team doesn't understand the Princeton architecture? (If so, email me). Closed source, commercial computational mathematics is not inevitable. We, as a community, cannot afford to let computational mathematics depend solely on commercial software. Since all companies die, the commercial software will disappear, taking all of us with it. We need standard algorithms that are open, well documented, and well implemented, supported by a standards organizations (NIST? ISO?), published in a standard format and kept up to date. We need computational mathematics courses based on openly available, well-documented software to teach the next generation. We need it now. Tim ======================================================================== Sage is Failing Measured by the mission statement, Sage has overall failed. The core goal is to provide similar functionality to Magma (and the other Ma's) across the board, and the Sage development model and community has failed to do this across the board, since after 9 years, based on our current progress, we will never get there. There are numerous core areas of research mathematics that I'm personally familiar with (in arithmetic geometry), where Sage has barely moved in years and Sage does only a few percent of what Magma does. Unless there is a viable plan for the areas to all be systematically addressed in a reasonable timeframe, not just with arithmetic geometry in Magma, but with everything in Mathematica, Maple., etc, we are definitely failing at the main goal I have for the Sage math software project. I have absolutely no doubt that money combined with good planning and management would make it possible to achieve our mission statement. I've seen this hundreds of times over at a small scale at Sage Days workshops during the last decade. And let's not forget that with very substantial funding, Linux now provides a viable free open source alternative to Microsoft Windows. Just providing Sage developers with travel expenses (and 0 salary) is enough to get a huge amount done, when possible. But all my attempts with foundations and other clients to get any significant funding, at even the level of 1% of the funding that Mathematica gets each year, has failed. For the life of the Sage project, we've never got more than maybe 0.1% of what Mathematica gets in revenue. It's just a fact that the mathematics community provides Mathematica $50+ million a year, enough to fund over 600 fulltime positions, and they won't provide enough to fund one single Sage developer fulltime. But the Sage mission statement remains, and even if everybody else in the world gives up on it, I HAVE NOT. SMC is my last ditch strategy to provide resources and visibility so we can succeed at this goal and give the world a viable free open source alternative to the Ma's. I wish I were writing interesting mathematical software, but I'm not, because I'm sucking it up and playing the long game. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
