David (It sounded like you were a bit discouraged and I hope this doesnt sound condescending but...) You were right to query - I believe we should always think it is legitimate to query how we might be able to do things be better.
But now that we've had that discussion and its seems like things will stay the same I want to suggest that right now this issue is far overshadowed by so many other more important ones. Having being surrounded by Matlab (and to a lesser extent Mathematica and Maple) for about 15 years in a corporate environment, I have to admit am in awe of the energy and rate of development of Sage since 2005. (Note - Im comparing 15 years of the "commercials" development to 5 years of Sage's) I recently attended an in-house promotion of the latest "major" release of Matlab and I cant tell you how underwhelmed I was over a release that justified a major increment of their version number. After mentally distilling their presentation to the bare bones, I surmised that basically their "major" release had some very minor improvements in functionality and some minor improvements in the GUI. So version numbers are often a marketing tool. One of the main issues is the choice Sage made for its development model. At first, it looked like the model represented the "building of a Frankenstein" but on closer examination its more like we're "collecting jewels" (the "best of breed" of open source that has the right amount of functionality, often years of development into precision specialist software, that wont take long to integrate and looks like it has potential for us to develop it further). Another cool point is: whatever success these jewels had outside of Sage, now they have access to to all of Sages community for development, documentation, bug finding and fixing (as Sage is similarly and symbiotically connected to the Python community for the development etc of some existing and future libraries) So Sage will continue having these packages being integrated into it (either by developers so they can participate in something big or found by the Sage community) so theres no way commercial software can keep up (regardless if they are ahead in market share at the moment - "No-one every got fired for buying IBM" once apon a time but were are they now?) Forget "Viable alternative", the reason why I feel these commercial products should be shuddering in their boots is because of this amazing and rare development model. best Ross On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 11:56 PM, Dr. David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > William Stein wrote: >> >> 2010/2/4 Dr. David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net>: >>> >>> ross k wrote: >>>> >>>> I know this subject is a contentious one so Ill just make a quick >>>> comment... >>>> >>>>> It would however mean that people that wanted a stable release to >>>>> install on >>>>> a server they can't change every couple of weeks, would chose an X.Y.1, >>>>> or >>>>> an X.Y.2, safe in the knowledge that it should be quite stable, as only >>>>> bug >>>>> fixes were applied. >>>>> . . . >>>>> Wolfram Research do that too, with their X.Y.Z. A major release was >>>>> Mathematica 6. Only bug fixes were applied in 6.0.1 - there was no new >>>>> functionality. >>>> >>>> Thats how I was deciding to upgrade a few months ago and I guess a >>>> number of people and companies think of versioning like this >>>> (including as you said Mathematica etc). >>> >>> It is a pretty standard way in software development. But with billions of >>> tickets merged into 4.3.1 (William's words) >>> >>> http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/msg/6c42bcd951a9f526 >>> >>> basing your decision on a Sage version number would not be very useful. >>> >>> I believe Sage is sufficiently mature that is should start being a bit >>> more like Mathematica, though I'm not suggesting a major release is made on >>> average every theee years, which is what Mathematica have done. I think its >>> been going 20 years, and is still only at version 7. >>> >> >> As long as I'm involved, Sage is not ever going to have a release >> cycle anything like Mathematica. Your wasting your time suggesting >> that. > > I thought I made it clear I was not suggesting that, when I said: > > "though I'm not suggesting a major release is made on average every theee > years, which is what Mathematica have done" > >>> I can't see there being a lot of take up of Sage in commercial companies >>> when the latest stable release is changing every month or so. >> >> Seriously, can anybody really see Sage ever getting taken up by "a lot >> of commercial companies" unless there is a support company in place >> like one has with RedHat, Novell, etc.? When there is a company >> standing behind supporting Sage, with paying customers, paid >> employees, and support contracts, then that company can have releases >> like you describe if that is actually what those paying customers >> want. > > With the very high cost of Mathematica, then I think Sage has a chance of > being used more in commercial companies. Then people will support it on a > commercial basis, like they do with Apache and Wireshark - two other > open-source projects. > > But even in a university environment, some people want something that does > not change as often. I'm not the first to make this point, and I doubt I'd > be the last. Perhaps asking on sage-support might have given a different > view, as that would more likely to reach users who are not developers. > > Anyway, I'm probably wasting my time, so I will not bother. > > Dave > > -- > To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to > sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel > URL: http://www.sagemath.org > -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
