Howdy, On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 3:57 AM, William Stein<[email protected]> wrote: > I have to add that not only is Sage very low on the above list, Sage > got the *most* "no" votes from the 30 people who actually voted (tying > only with Networkx), according to the table here: > > http://fdoperez.blogspot.com/2009/06/scipy-advanced-tutorials-results.html > > I don't know if I should interpret this as: > > (1) Sage doesn't at all provide what is needed by "the scipy community", or > > (2) The scipy community has a strong opinion that in fact sage is > worse than useless.
I have to say that *personally* I was both surprised and disappointed at the low ranking Sage got, since I was hoping to have a Sage tutorial again this year. On every talk I give on scientific computing with Python I always make a point of highlighting Sage, I use it myself and I think it's a key asset of a larger ecosystem of open source tools for scientific computing based on Python. But all I'm doing here is reporting the numbers as they came: the only change I made to the raw Doodle data was to remove the voters' names and transpose the table for readability (Doodle returns each topic as a column, which is annoying to read). > It might also be relevant that Sage, Hermes, and Networkx (in the > bottom 4) are all GPL'd, but the top 7 packages by interest in the > list above are all non-GPL (BSD or MIT licensed). It may just be > that whoever voted are mostly people who believe they can't use GPL'd > code. > > Anyway, I find Fernando's justification for the ranking "the ranking > roughly follows the generality of the tools" to be an unsatisfactory > explanation or summary of the data. Rather, perhaps the ranking > roughly follows the restrictiveness of the *license*. That was just a hand-wavy argument, since ultimately I can't know why people voted the way they did. I should note that Networkx is LGPL, not GPL; see https://networkx.lanl.gov/trac/browser/networkx/trunk/doc/GNU_LGPL.txt and https://networkx.lanl.gov/trac/browser/networkx/trunk/networkx/release.py, which specifically contains 1 """Release data for NetworkX.""" 2 3 # Copyright (C) 2004-2008 by 4 # Aric Hagberg <[email protected]> 5 # Dan Schult <[email protected]> 6 # Pieter Swart <[email protected]> 7 # Distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License 8 # http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html So the bottommost project (which as I mentioned, I also love and wanted to get a tutorial on) is not GPL. I should have definitely qualified my 'generality' comment by pointing that Sage was the outlier in this (weak) pattern: while finite elements, time series and graph theory are specialized topics, sage is a super-broad-spectrum tool, so it definitely doesn't fit that trend. That point was clear to me and did surprise me very much, I just failed to mention it last night (I wrote that blog post rather in a hurry, tired, and was mostly annoyed at blogspot's mangling of the table html). I sort of doubt that most people would make their decisions on what tools to learn based on licenses, or at least I hope that's the case. But perhaps I'm wrong on that and just naive... In any case, all I can do is report back the results as they came. In this case, I'm just the messenger :) Cheers, f --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
