On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 8:12 AM, William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 5:32 AM, Gabriel Dos Reis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 2:39 AM, mabshoff > > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > > On Apr 22, 9:15 am, "Alfredo Portes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 1:41 AM, mabshoff > > > > > > > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > > > > Hi, > > > > > > > > > > > Well, I think NAG chose the "non-commercial only" license on > purpose. > > > > > We have discussed the issue here before and everybody agrees that > it > > > > > is GPL incompatible. But I have little hope that Sage's potential > > > > > interest in Aldor would get somebody to change the license. A > "non- > > > > > commercial only" Open Source license is often the kiss of death > to a > > > > > project. Abandoned by its commercial parent company, but not free > in > > > > > reality it is neither here nor there. Either you make the code > free > > > > > [your choice: GPL, LGPL, MIT, BSD] or you don't. It is either Open > > > > > Source code or it isn't, just like you can't be a little big > > > > > pregnant :) > > > > > > > > Yes, just like QT...oh wait. > > > > > > Well, I don't think the situation is comparable. TrollTech understood > > > Open Source way back. Axiom was released under BSD, so why the > > > different treatment for Aldor? > > > > From the little I know, the situation -- as it has been carefully > explained > > to me -- is far more complicated, and I'm not sure it is one that can be > > resolved by emails. All I can say is that there really are good guys at > > NAG who would not like to see Axiom die (as it was) and they did the best > > to make it open source under a very liberal license (no poison). The > > surrounding environment and conditions for releasing Aldor had changed > from > > what they were back when Axiom was released. I would recommend > > you talk to Mike Dewar, Stephen Watt, Barry Trager (among others) about > > the situation. However, I doubt it can be resolved by public emails -- > and if > > it is resolved by public emails, then that is fantastic!. > > I can imagine. Is the conclusion to draw from the above that you think > it unlikely Aldor will be released under a standard open source license > in the near future, but that you very much wish it would be?
Stephen Watt has indicated, at many times, that he is very willing to clarify the Aldor license terms -- I believe he intends to write a sort of FAQ that would shed light on the issue. I can imagine that the voice of a big player (Sage) is not the same as that of a small group (Axiom community at the time); so it might be that Sage could be more persuasive; but I suspect it would take lot of face-to-face conversions. At ISSAC'08, you'd very likely to meet people would shaped the development and release of Axiom and Aldor. However, unless there is a new player with new material in the discussion, I would not expect the situation to change. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > A petition to really open source Aldor won't hurt > > > > I think. What is the worst that can happen? Yes, I know the answer > "go and > > > > start one" :-( > > > > > > Out of curiosity: Are there download statistics of Aldor binaries and > > > source? Is there any kind of estimate of user numbers? How far along > > > is FriCAS and/or OpenAxiom from using "pure" Aldor and no lisp? Are > > > there any benchmarks to compare those two? > > > > Because of licensing issues -- OpenAxiom is released under BSD license -- > > and dependency problems, I cannot make OpenAxiom purely depending > > on Aldor. Whoever, it should be possible to call Aldor libraries from > OpenAxiom > > and vice versa (and if that does not work, it is likely a bug in > OpenAxiom). > > You didn't answer the questions about downloads/users/etc. Sorry about that -- I did not have enough coffee :-) Download: The numbers I have are the ones from SF website. When I ask for the raw number for the last two months ( Feb 23, 2008 - Apr 22, 2008), it says 685 downloads. I see a peak at 34 yesterday (I have no clue about what was going on yesterday). http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/detail.php?group_id=203172&ugn=open-axiom&type=prdownload The Windows binary is said to have been downloaded 319 times but Alfredo and I know that the actual numbers are higher than that because the count was reset when the binary file was upgraded. The source tarball has been downloaded 133 times. Combined, the RPMs have been downloaded 78 times. Users: I have no numbers, except extrapolating from downloads and people sending me emails. > Should we write to NAG to ask? Yes, that is a very good initiative. Mike Dewar is among the NAG people you might want to talk to. > > > > > > As I have stated many times, and part of the reasons for OpenAxiom, I > > would like to > > get away from Lisp as soon as possible: This isn't negociable. > > For people in Sage-devel who don't know, OpenAxiom has the following > goal (from their website): "OpenAxiom strives to support ubiquitous, > advanced, high quality open source computer algebra on major operating > systems, in particular major Unix variants, GNU/Linux variants, > Windows, and handheld devices. It aims at being the open source > computer algebra system of choice for research, teaching, engineering, > etc." > > Thus their goals overlap a lot with Sage, and they do care a great deal about > portability to different platforms. Gaby -- since our goals are so similar > I hope there are ways we can work together. Yes, that is my hope too -- in fact, I got similar requests from users in Europe. > > > > From my perspective, it is NOT a scalable technology for writing large > > scale systems > > given the zoo of users, developers, and development environments we have > today. > > I know Lisp enthusiasts think the opposite and are likely to say "you > > don't get it". > > Well I agree completely with you. > > > > At the moment, I don't have formal benchmark to assess OpenAxiom, > > except the tiny > > regression testsuite. I must also confess that most of my work wo far > > has concentrated > > on getting rid of as mush Lisps as can and fixing the compiler and > > interpreter. The > > design of the Algebraic Virtual Machine for OpenAxiom is still > progressing. > > How are you getting rid of as much Lisp as you can in OpenAxiom? Does > this involve porting Lisp code to Aldor, or ? What I've done so far is: (1) reduce the amount of Lisp code (usually replacing with Boot codes). (2) the non-portable Lisp codes have been replaced by C codes , and Foreign Function Interface is used to glue things together -- that has proven far more effective than series of `#+', `#-' with no end in sight. The core non-algebra part is written in a domain specific language called Boot (a pun on bootstrapping Axiom). Originally, it originated as a syntactic sugar over Lisp, but a sugar that makes writing the interpreter and compiler an enjoyable exercise. The Boot code has some complement written in Lisp (essentially for some macros assisting the runtime system). Boot can be thought of as the `weakly typed' version of Spad (the library extension language) -- though I have been busy adding type annotations back (so that silly errors get caught as early as possible). For some reasons, the base Axiom source code I started working with has Boot code translated back to Lisp, which I found curious. I removed those Lisp codes, replacing them with the Boot equivalent. I believe that, as of today, OpenAxiom has much less Lisp codes for the interper and compiler than the others from the Axiom family. The goal is to remove any reference to Lisp. To succeed, there must be a Boot translator, and one that can translate to something other than Lisp -- either C++ or Java (anything with better support than Lisp). Fortunately, Boot is not complicated and the translator (called Bemol) written in C++ is progressing quite well. I hope that by OpenAxiom-2.0, the Bemol translator would be a viable alternative. (Last fall, I had students who attempted to write a Spad->C++ translator, but they did not have the runtime system). > > Also, what is the Alebraic Virtual Machine? > > I think these are all good questions to discuss on #sage-devel, since > Sage is about unifying all mathematical software systems, so it is > very good to be aware of what ideas you have in the pipeline for > OpenAxiom. The Algebraic Virtual Machine is my idea for replacing the current runtime system. The idea is that the AVM should: (1) interoperate with native codes (e.g. codes written in C or C++), without requiring excessive work, and without adding overhead. (2) contain primitives for supporting algebraic codes. For example, `reduction' operation should be supported at the basic level. The reason for this is that, if OpenAxiom is to scale to multicores and effectivelly support parallel algorithms, the basic primitives should be part of the AVM, as opposed to be grafted as an afterthought to Spad. (3) the AVM should shield library codes from non-portability issues such as multithreading support, OS-specific requirements, etc. -- Gaby --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
