I agree; I'm not sure 10^6 users is a useful goal to have, although I am not against it.
One of my hopes/goals for Sage is to make every mathematics researcher and educator aware of its existence, and for it to be useful to a large fraction of those folks. Accomplishing that would result in roughly 10,000 "users", but many of those users would be deploying it in classes with many students each semester. If you count the students as users, that would give about 10^5 users. It would be interesting to pick some math departments at random and see what fraction of faculty had heard of sage. -M. Hampton On Mar 9, 11:13 am, Martin Albrecht <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Estimate of number of Sage users by year: > > > Feb 2005: 3 > > Feb 2006: 100 > > Feb 2007: 500 > > Feb 2008: 5,000 > > Feb 2009: 10,000 (Goal) > > Feb 2009: 25,000 (Goal) > > Feb 2010: 100,000 (Goal) > > Feb 2011: 1,000,000 (Goal) > > Hi, > > I wonder what the status of this goals is. Is it something we all should > strive for? I guess at the end of the day we all have our own agendas because > Sage is a volunteer driven project but still I am unsure what these goals > mean. To be more specific, I am not sure that I'd aim for 10^6 Sage users. As > William pointed out already this would mean a lot of maintenance and > infrastructure work. Also, I doubt that there are 10^6 mathematicians out > there in need of a mathematics software for their research so I figure by > seriously(!) aiming for way more users than research mathematicians Sage's > slogan would need to drop the "viable alternative MAGMA". You don't get 10^6 > users with a sophisticated modell of p-Adics but you might get them with > flashy graphics. Sure we can do both but this is not represented in these > goal figures. Or in other words: I am willing to sacrifice this massive > growth for "critical peer acclaim". If we'd really aim for > maximum "marketshare" we might miss the point where we could have created a > viable open-source alternative to Magma a major contribution to the > mathematical sciences. In my book research papers citing Sage are a much > better benchmark. > > To avoid misunderstandings: I am not against 10^6 users, it is just not my > goal. > > Thoughts? > > From the ivory tower ;-) > 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://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
