On Feb 4, 2:36 pm, Rob Beezer <goo...@beezer.cotse.net> wrote: Hi Rob,
> I still get a lot of education-related email from Mathematica, and it > has struck me the past few months that they seemed much more "engaged" > or "concerned" about the welfare of their users. So I'd been having > some of the same thoughts about SAGE's influence. If not cheaper, > then Mathematica has at least become kinder and gentler, perhaps. ;-) Well, I still think that the financial crises also has a large part to do with this offer and it is also all about maximizing the number of MMA license you can sell. And there is likely a huge market for the mathematically inclined that are not working in higher education and no longer students and having them spend $300 on such a MMA license is a better return than those people either using pirated copies or not MMA at all. Either way, if Sage is part of making Wolfram, Inc. kinder and gentler we will all benefit since the more people use CAS the more potential users for Sage are out there. And Sage's long term goal is world domination after all :). So is there any MMA mole around here who could clue us in? At the main 2008 AMS meeting it become clear that at least the technical folks at Wolfram were well aware of the existence of Sage, but probably William should comment on that. IIRC he also had a blog post about the interaction he had at that AMS meerting with Wolfram Inc. and MuPAD. I would also suspect in general that for Matlab, Maple and MMA the biggest competition just like for MS are the previous releases of their software since switching to the competition implies a high cost for moving working code (regardless whether the new program is open or not) and that is in the end what we need to overcome to get more users from the commercial competition. One more note: In the above thread a Japanese user commented that the current MMA release sets him back a whopping $4,700 when taking into account the current exchange rate. The professional release MMA in the US might seem obscenely expensive, but that one takes the cake. Note that the Solaris version of MMA is still more expensive than that. > Rob Cheers, Michael --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
