On 18 May 2015 17:29, "William Stein" <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It's also worth keeping in mind that people may offer to host services > at their university, unaware that what they are doing might > potentially violate rules. At least, I know from personal experience > that this could be an issue.. It's interesting to compare: > > 1. Univ of Washington's policy on use of equipment at [1] -- > > with > > 2. Google's cloud computing use policy at [2] -- basically, don't > send spam or break the law. > than I imagined and getting worse. > > I've wondered for years why so few people provide online computing > resources to the math research community... why I was the main person > to do be doing this (since I started in the 1990s). Now maybe I know > -- I was just really naive. > > The legal situation is probably much different at private universities > and universities outside of the USA. > > [1] http://www.washington.edu/admin/rules/policies/APS/47.02.html The first sentence in the link says "University facilities, computers, and equipment are to be used to support its teaching, research, service, and administrative functions." I don't see why hosting Sage related facilities do not fall into that. As with many rules, there is some ambiguity in places, but collaborating with others outside your own organization is a normal part of academic research. That includes universities, standards laboratories, and in some commercial organizations. I recall once proposing using the results of Wolfram Alpha in doc tests. a couple of times when the issue of what might be permitted with Mathematica came up - one was on using the results of Wolfram|Alpha results in doctests. AlexGhitza thought this might be against the license, and depending on how you interpreted it, have may have had a point. https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!msg/sage-devel/XBV79YDrdxc/zAz0-5Tyih8J So I emailed Wolfram Research, and they were quite happy for us to do this. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/sage-devel/wolfram$20alpha$20tests$20kirkby/sage-devel/tijz3svNNiE/WOz6mQUGvU8J I can't help feeling you could (should) have made some direct inquires internally, to seek permission for what was being done. It seems to me it would have been easy to justify. You realized that some had abused the trust you gave in which a home directory was publicly visible, and removed that facility. So such justification could include * The huge benefit it has given to Sage which is a research project. * The problems removing the facilities would cause * Any abuse you are aware of, which has been very small, you have acted quickly to stop. I don't see what it is not too late to do this now, before it causes any more issues. Taking my own case, I contributed quite a bit to increasing the portability of Sage. Primarily to Solaris, although I'm sure some of the changes have aided other ports. In a recent list you drew up of contributors, I was in the top 10, although of course others would argue about the way the list was generated. Since I don't work for a university, that would have been impossible without the facilities of UW. Somehow I think it would be easy to justify what was being done hosting Sage related activities. 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.
