On Sat, 2011-02-26 at 20:09 -0800, Nils Bruin wrote: > On Feb 25, 10:52 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > 2) Pay for advertising Sage in maths journals, New Scientist, or if > > > deemed appropriate, anywhere where the 4 M's are advertised. > > > > b) Is 2) something that will annoy anybody reading this? I could see > > somebody being annoyed that valuable Sage money is being spent on > > advertising. (I personally think advertising is a good idea.) > > Do you have good reasons for thinking that? Not that you need them or > need to share them. I am just wondering. > I would personally like to see sage develop into a platform that I can > use for my research needs. When I look at other programs that fit in > that category (magma, kant/kash, pari, singular, gap, python, gcc), I > notice that none of those feel the need to advertise. Is there > something that sage might gain from advertising that those other > programs wouldn't? Are those other projects missing opportunities? >
Well, "missing opportunities" has a lot to do with project goals. If you are advertising, what is it you are advertising? Are you trying to get more developers? Why not use sourceforge, etc to post help requests? Are you trying to get more users? Why not use a direct phone/mail campaign to your likely targets, which for Sage would be other schools and peers at other schools. A table at the math conferences is a great idea and you should continue that. If you are advertising to attract money then what would your ad copy be about? Money only goes where it can grow. Why would someone invest in Sage if it is not already a commercial entity? I am a little unclear about the financial growth potential of any open source computational mathematics package. What is the business plan? What is the elevator pitch? What are the 3 year payback goals? Is it 1) advertise 2)... 3) profit! If you are advertising to attract attention then Google might not be the best place. Most universities probably already have MMA and Maple so professors and students know about them. If they are using these tools in class they are probably already aware of what is available. I know that when I taught, say compilers, I reviewed pretty much every compiler textbook I could find. I doubt that a professor is going to be swayed by a Google ad. I could be wrong in an individual instance but less likely to be wrong in the general case. Are you advertising to a particular niche market? For instance, Mathcad is very engineering oriented and has a lot of special purpose packages such as a way to get GPIB data off your spiffy HP equipment. Lab guys love it and will pay for this ability. Sage has no GPIB support. Some projects, like Axiom, are not "missing opportunities" since there is nothing about the project goals that would make a Google ad relevant. What Sage project goals require ads? Is Sage really ready to compete head-to-head with MMA and Maple? Would Sage know what to do with ten thousand end-users (students) demanding support? Personally I would love to see Sage "win big" because I fear the "dark ages" that will occur when MMA and Maple disappear. You might not think this could happen but how many companies do you know that are 50 years old? And what ever happened to Macsyma (Symbolics died but you can still buy it for DOS). What about Derive? (TI bought it, rewrote it into C++ but refused to release the original Lisp code to me). Reduce? (Tony Hearn released the code as open source but I don't know who is maintaining it). Axiom was one of "the commercial big three" with MMA and Maple. When MMA and Maple (recently bought by a company in Japan) go under where will computational mathematics be? Will MMA and Maple become open source? Who will maintain them? Who but the original authors could understand their internals? What happens to all of those thousands of algorithms? So I hope that you advertise well. I hope you start a company. I hope you all get rich and famous. But I also think that there needs to be a bit more thought about exactly what it is you would advertise and what you are trying to achieve by it. Tim Daly -- 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
