I did not say "totally unscientific fishing expedition", just "fishing expedition".
I have no objection to fishing expeditions per se. Sorry if I gave you that impression. As for IRB stuff. Maybe that's more of a are-you-in-the-USA issue? I would like to think that people in other countries are protected AT LEAST as much as in the USA, but maybe other countries are more realistic. I stopped asking for NSF funding for user-interface kinds of research when I was told by a review panel that I would have to hire some expert in human factors and go through some testing-on-humans process etc. My thought was that I (with some students) would implement some ideas that would be so evidently neat that other people would adopt them and incorporate the ideas in whatever they were doing and thereby demonstrate their utility. That way I could do the research I wanted to do, and other people who specialized in human factors or whatever, could test them as they saw fit. Unfortunately, the reviewers were those "other people who specialized in human factors" and therefore they viewed their own contributions as front-and-center necessary in my proposal. This is a common issue. For example, if a computer algebra system proposal mentions in some sidelight that some numerical analysis library programs would be used, then the proposal is reviewed by numerical analysis specialists who take a dim view of spending NSF (or whatever agency) money on someone who is not offering to conduct fundamental ground-breaking research in numerical computation. This is perhaps off-topic for Sage-Devel, but maybe speaks to some issues of interest to Anthony Durity. After all, if one wishes to develop scientific software in some framework where funding is needed, then one needs to figure out how to get funding. Government? Industry? Starting a company? And how to continue to get funding. Licenses? Donations? Selling ads? If the FOSS model can be shown to work for Sage in both startup and continuation modes, that's something interesting. I do recall that a few months ago William Stein said he was moving on to something else, more researchy, but I guess he is still hanging around. I don't know if Sage will ever reach what I would call steady-state, and so it is not clear what the steady-state model would have to be, financially etc. Based on past experiences in programs that may or may not be comparable in your view to Sage, a relatively successful academic program (even for 5 or 10 years) can have some major perturbations. (Macsyma, Maple, Matlab, Mupad, Scratchpad/Axiom/Fricas, Theorist, ...). One can argue that the internet changes so much that we cannot draw conclusions from these past events. Sure. But can we draw the conclusion that the internet will make FOSS for scientific computing a success? For fully-written more-or-less closed- end programs (maybe like the Gnu scientific subroutines?) it is possible to declare success. Maybe. For open-ended programs that attempt to grow to include almost anything that is "mathy" enough, and runs on any computer ... that seems harder. The apparent situation that Sage still doesn't run on Windows, natively, is to me a caution. Does everyone with windows (or other non- unix OS) have to run Sage in a virtual machine environment with some unix emulator? grump, grump :) RJF RJF -- 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
