I think your points are very important. Competing with a commercial CAS (or with any commercial software really) is much more about boring aspects of software development rather than exciting ones. In my experience the FLOSS community can excel at solving technically challenging problem, but it often struggles when it comes to subjects like QA, documentation, user interfaces, etc. Those are chronically weak points in projects such as LibreOffice, Firefox, the linux desktop environments in general, office programs, etc. It should not matter as much in math/science oriented software, but for whatever reason it seems like the CAS crowd needs to be pampered much more than (say) the numerical computing crowd.
The other point you make is really about academia being (for the most part) ethically bankrupt. I doubt this will change substantially in the short-medium term. On 26 February 2016 at 13:44, parisse <bernard.pari...@ujf-grenoble.fr> wrote: > Regarding the mission statement, I'm a little bit skeptic one can build a > viable alternative to Magma on one side and Maple, Mathematica, Matlab on > the other side. Magma is a very specialized software that is probably > unknown to most mathematicians, and almost certainly unknown in other > scientific fields, while most mathematicians and many scientists in other > fields have heard about Maple, Mathematica and Matlab. From my very little > experience trying sagemath, the system seems to me to be more designed to > be an alternative to Magma than to Maple, Mathematica or Matlab. > Perhaps because it's fun to code something exciting related to your math > research while it's not fun to write interfaces, fix bugs, support windows, > write documentation targetting large number of students, code heuristics > for nice solvers and antiderivatives... That's probably the reason why > Maple, Mathematica and Matlab are commercial softwares: people doing the > boring work want to be rewarded for that. And you can not expect to be > rewarded by the math community, most mathematicians don't care about > software production, about opensourceness, just look how the scientific > editors make money with the work of mathematicians and scientists in > general. > I don't know if the opendreamkit will succeed doing the boring work, but I > believe there are several obstacles: the proposed salaries, the career > perspectives, the code long term support... It's safer to bet on one person > who is dedicated to the software, but the size of sagemath is probably too > huge to be supported by one person alone. > > -- > 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. > -- 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.
