One other thing that I think is relevant in a situation like this: software like Mathematica will have a major economic damping factor applied to its growth, so that after it reaches a large number of users, it will effectively saturate its market (since others can't pay for it)
sage will be limited by the cost of the goods that are necessary to use it - i.e. a computer with a web browser, people with enough free time and patience to use it, etc On Mar 9, 11:38 am, "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 8:31 AM, mhampton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I agree; I'm not sure 10^6 users is a useful goal to have, although I > > am not against it. > > Again, the goal is not 10^6 users, it is "to be a viable alternative to > Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, and Magma". Any free program that > genuinely attains that goal would *have* to have 10^6 users within > some reasonable amount of time. Thus I consider the 10^6 business > not a goal in itself, but a clear way to measure whether we have achieved > success or not. > > > 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. > > Students would definitely count. > > -- > William Stein > Associate Professor of Mathematics > University of Washingtonhttp://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
