On Sunday, November 2, 2014 3:06:20 AM UTC-8, Sergey Kirpichev wrote: > > On Sat, Nov 01, 2014 at 09:22:06PM -0700, Richard Fateman wrote: > > Why this is impossible for open-source programs? > > > > It is not impossible, but I am unaware of (unpaid) maintainers of > > open-source programmers carrying pagers on their belts so they can be > on call 24 hours > > a day for resolving problems. > > Why "unpaid"? > > > Of course it is possible > > to pay people to help with open source code (e.g. some unix supporters). > > Yes, exactly. > There is a difference in the size of the user base and there is a difference in the sophistication of the code. The Cathedral and the Bazaar essay doesn't work if bugs do not become shallow with enough eyes. You can dig a ditch with many shovellers. It is implausible to do a heart transplant that way.
> > > But once you are paying, and not looking at the code yourself, it kind > > of changes the equation. > > Yes, but in first - you can do anything that can do a client of > closed-source vendors. And much more (look to the code yourself, pay > someone else for support, etc) > In principle. Practically, are you willing to pay someone to become an expert on (say) Maxima so that sympy can learn from it? Maxima is open source of course. > > > Apparently, Spain universities doesn't matter for the > > Wolfram Research. > > > > That sounds reasonable to me. > > Are you sure that any academic institution does matter for Wolfram? > I don;t know what their market looks like, but I am quite sure that the people buying Mathematica for Univ. Calif ask the users at UC, and for the most part they don't are about bug reports enough to cancel the re-licensing... > > > Or they count "a serious mistake on the > > determinant operation" as not important. > > > > Determinants where the entries are exact integers of extremely many > digits > > may not be terribly important. What do you think? > > In first - there is a regression. Second, det's of big matrix > - only a symptom of the problem. I don't know what the real problem > is and how severe it is. > i agree. It might be a problem with (say) addition of certain big numbers. But I doubt it. Probably some hack with modular numbers, gone wrong. > > > Worst news - there is an inevitable vendor lock-in. You can't give > > your money someone else (but only single "group of experts", mostly > > anonymous for you) to fix the issue. > > > > You can form a union of concerned users, e.g. IBM had SHARE. > > Is this union can fix closed sources? > Not usually, but it can complain louder. > > > While SymPy uses the Karr convention instead: > > > > Michael Karr? > > Yes, see the bibliography in the docstring of Sum. > > > Who named it the Karr convention? > > Perhaps, we are. Not sure if it's a conventional naming in > the literative, can you suggest a better reference here? > This convention was certainly in wide use before 1961. I don't know of a "name", but until computer programmers got in the way, it was probably the normal definition of sum from a to b with a>b. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/c4c1c395-4111-483a-8ff4-44743ce7e464%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
