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/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
