Dear Sage Developers, I spent 2004 starting the SageMath project, and in 2005, choose the name "SAGE" (=Software for Arithmetic Geometry Experimentation) inspired by my wife's Navajo traditions that involve burning sage. I bought the sagemath.org and sagemath.com domain names shortly thereafter, and have paid with them out of my pocket for a decade. As Sage went from something that I did fulltime (with no help) to something with other people's help, and many decisions regarding direction had to be made, I came up with a mission statement for the project:
Create a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab. This is as much my goal *right now* in 2016, as it was in 2006, and everything I'm doing right now is part of a longterm strategic approach to accomplishing this goal, informed by my reducing naivety and idealism. The point of the Sage project is to build the car, instead of reinventing the wheel. It is to use everything good from open source, and to get open source developers and projects to work together toward a common goal, rather than petty competition with each other. It is to stop ignoring the fact that in many ways Magma, Mathematica, etc. are *decades* ahead of everything in open source and that academia produces. How has the Sage project done after 10 years? Traffic to the SageMath.org website has NOT increased at all (actually gone down a little) more or less since 2011. It's *very* generous to estimate that the number of users of Sage is maybe 5% of that of Mathematica. So despite us thinking that Sage's core functionality is in many cases a viable alternative to that of the Ma's, there is clearly something very, very seriously lacking. If Sage were really a viable alternative, people would use it instead of giving the Ma's over $100million/year. There are dozens of serious issues that hold back adoption, e.g., documentation, marketing, functionality, etc.; if you put in the work and listen to criticism from users, you will know. I have talked to a *LOT* of users and potential users of Sage. Due to founding the project, I'm the recipient of many random complaints from people, and I have spent a week on my feet fielding complaints and questions about Sage all day long at the Joint mathematics meetings for 9 years in a row (which means lots of questions from non-Sage users). It's very clear to me that two huge parts of being "a viable alternative to the Ma's" are (1) very easy access/installation, and (2) commercial support. Regarding (1), we all know how bad the situation is with Sage -- I recently checked our mailing lists over a month and nearly half the threads were about install/build issues; also, we don't even have a native windows version. Regarding (2), there are many teachers out there who get paid by student tuition to teach courses and want to provide a professional quality experience to their students (not something "grungy"). If they choose an Ma*, they get dedicated high-quality commercial support for themselves and their students (commercial support means a lot of things beyond "somebody to talk to"). Commercial support is something that Sage must also provide to be a viable alternative. This was clear from the beginning. Back in 2007 we tried to get started (see https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sage-dotcom), but I was too afraid and naive to start a company at that time. The existence of a company, SageMath, Inc., fits well with the mission statement of the project I founded. Nathann Cohen clearly prefers a software project with a very different mission statement. Ethically preferring "academic use only" (but still technically using GPL), where every decision is made democratically, with idealistic goals of purity. Where there are no new releases with bugs ("it's ethically wrong to make a release of Sage with known bugs!"). That is NOT the project I started, that I host, and that I have given a huge amount of my life to. And I'm old enough to know that it is not the sort of project that could ever compete with the Ma's in any meaningful way. Nathann -- why don't you come up with your own mission statement, rules, project name, and go for it!? You can even start with the complete Sage codebase. For everbody else who wants to create a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab, let's step up our f'n game and actually do it. Those people in statistics did (with R) and we can too! -- William -- William (http://wstein.org) -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
