Thanks for the recap. BTW, I think the photo of the trophy is backwards (it's "copyleft" not copyright).
On Nov 30, 2007, at 2:19 PM, Martin Albrecht wrote: > Hi there, > > I guess I should give a little report about the competition. As you > might > know, we won the first price in the science category. Giac won the > the third > price and Getfem++ scored the second. > > The first price includes a price money of 3000 Euros which will be > transfered > to the Sage Foundation. We also won a trophy > > http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/malb/graphics/ > trophee_du_libre_2007_-_trophy.jpg > > some 'Mandrivia goodies' and a laptop compute from Dell (Core2Duo, > 2GB RAM). > > Also, we won free hosting via Nexen in a data center in Paris. This > price only > includes 7GB of disc space but I talked to the head of that > company - Damien > Seguy - after the ceremony (he was also the head juror in the science > category and is a really nice guy btw.) and he told me that we can > pretty > much have whatever we need as long as we don't bug them too much. So > basically we indicate our needs, they set it up and we administrate > our stuff > ourself: We crash it, we reboot it, period. So at least a second > European > mirror seems feasible. > > Also, Cetril ( http://www.cetril.org/ ) offered every finalist > office space > and some support in Soissons, France free of charge for one year. I > think > this is part of their mission to promote free software, but I had > trouble > understanding the details (e.g. what kind of support) due to an > ambiguous > English translation. If anybody is interested I can contact Cetril > though. > > It seems the jury was quite impressed by what we can do and they > expect great > things from us in the following year :-) Their decision was > influenced by the > way the Sage project works: everything is done in the open and > William is > giving up control to some extend rather than a private project with > code > drops now and then. Also, I was asked several times when we are > going to be > in Debian/unstable which seems to be a quality benchmark to a fair > amount of > people. I have to admit that I am almost convinced that this is as > important > as a Windows port. There might be much more Windows users but Linux > users > tend to be more active (bug reports, contributing). Other questions > centred > around applied math and the overall vibe was that Octave and Scilab > were much > more powerful than numpy and scipy. Frédéric Lehobey (a juror in > the science > category) agreed to explain this position on [sage-devel] some time > soon. > > Besides the 20 minute talk in front of the jury I also had to give > a 3 minute > presentation in front of the whole crowd. For this I simply worked > through > the demo worksheet. This turned out to be a mistake. The result was > that I > was asked afterwards if my *website* would solve calculus homework > or if it > was easy to install my website locally. So apparently I left at > least some > people under the impression that Sage is a web service. > > I also sat down the the main author of Giac for a while and he is > going to > write an interface for Giac somewhen in the next couple of months. > > Apparently, Trophees du Libre is the biggest free software award > around and is > a 'free software' rather than an 'open-source' award. For instance > the head > of the Free Software Foundation Europe was the chairman of the jury. > > We were also encouraged to attend LinuxTag ( http:// > www.linuxtag.org/2007/ ) > in Germany and the Libre software meeting ( http://2007.rmll.info/? > lang=en ) > in France and I agree in general that we should attend some more > general > open-source meetings. After all, this community has a lot to offer > and can > provide many very useful resources, e.g. I talked to the main guy from > http://openusability.org which might be useful at some point. > > Btw. we mustn't enter next year. > > Cheers, > Martin > > -- > name: Martin Albrecht > _pgp: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8EF0DC99 > _www: http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb > _jab: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
