I think the whole closed source nature is likely to restrict the takeup of Sage for several broad groups of people when they realise that to get high performance they are going to need to store sensitive material on a Linux server they don't control.
As a 50 year old engineer I have worked at three institutions who I know would not want to put workbooks on a server outside their institution. a) Ministry of Defence - no way. b) Airbus - no way. They are very strict on security. c) Marconi - most unlikely. 1) Many commercial companies are not going to be so keen to put commercially sensitive material on a server they don't control. Interlecural property is valuable company asset. Suddenly buying distributed licenses for Mathematica is more attractive from a security point of view. At least Wolfram Research can't look at what you are doing. 2) Military users are very unlikely to start working on something on a distributed system they can't totally control. 3) Some academics, especially those working on mathematics in areas they know UW specialise in, would perhaps no want to put worksheets on a server they know prying eyes will see. Why let someone else look at what you are working on and possibly beat you to publish a paper? 4) Some individuals are just paranoid and will not use a distributed system they don't control. No doubt HTTPS will be used to encrypt data in transit. Maybe worksheets are stored in an encrypted format on disk. But at some stage the data going to be in plain text. Has anyone working on SageMathCloud ever considered that certain users would not want data stored in a manner they have no control over? Dave. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
