On Nov 30, 11:19 pm, Martin Albrecht <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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_2...
>
> 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.
sage.eu would be nice. Let's hope we get shell access.
> 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).
William and I did discuss this yesterday in IRC and the consensus was
that growing too quickly can be dangerous, too. And I tend to agree
with you that the Windows user base will be on average less
technically capable than the Linux one. But on the other hand the
n00bs tend to expose bugs that an experienced user or developer avoids
because he/she knows better. So in the end we can only win ;)
Being part of Debian will a good thing and much more feasible in the
short term. Both issues are somewhat orthogonal from the stand point
of personal. Hopefully we will get some more active support from the
Debian people, ondrej certainly seems to be the right person to manage
all the Debian issues. We have a google group debian-sage where we are
currently discussing packaging and general issues in that regard.
Please join if you are interested and want to help out.
> 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.
Nice.
> 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
> fromhttp://openusability.orgwhich might be useful at some point.
Sounds like an excellent idea.
> Btw. we mustn't enter next year.
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
Cheers,
Michael
> --
> 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]
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