Am 03.11.2014 um 03:56 schrieb Richard Fateman:
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.
You can get around that with automatic validation. The better the validation the better the results. Also, I doubt that closed source is much better at this. Whether it's open or closed source, you need some really bright people on the team, and either way, it's not easy to attract or keep them. Closed source can offer bundles of money, open source can choose among the whole world, so it's not even clear which approach will give you more bright people.
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.
It's just the question whether you want to pay a company or a team of people. The company can more easily build a name, so as a customer you can say "oh they won't goof up because they have to lose from that". On the minus side, companies tend to have trade secrets and use them to hide their skeletons in the closet from you.
For a team, it's just the other way round. -- 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/54574A36.8080609%40durchholz.org. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
