On Apr 20, 9:07 pm, TimDaly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <SNIP>
> The 4Ms cannot make this kind of leap. The corporate structure won't > allow anything so innovative to set direction. In fact, I doubt you > could get Google, despite its corporate cleverness, to even consider > funding the development of such an interface, despite the fact that > they ARE "the river of the internet". At best, you get funded for > yet-another-notebook. Sigh. > > You can continue to copy the 4Ms or by defining the new tacits and > affordances you can make the 4Ms irrelevant. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, > "A great general wins wars by not fighting them" > > Think long term. Look toward the 30 year horizon. Hi Tim, I have often joked that you would have told Linus: "Why bother with Linux? The competition, i.e. Windows, will be dead in thirty years anyway and we will have something better." That comparison isn't very accurate and fair, but we [the Sage commuity] have the goal to compete *now* with the 4Ms. Sure, Macsyma and Symbolics died, but that is IMHO because the 4Ms were good enough. Axiom failed as a commercial product and you did explain to me that it was more for political reasons, i.e. platform choice by NAG than purely technical reasons, but that is part of "reality" and we have to deal with it and not some ideal utopia where software projects actually make it on technical merit alone and the playing field is level. Windows 95 and Windows NT4 were technologically a joke compared to the competition [NT4 less so], but the Windows franchise won in the end in large portions of the computing sector because it was also good "enough". And in the end I see Axiom vs. the rest of the CAS world in the same light. Windows Server 2003 R2 and Windows Server 2008 are solid products and while I prefer not to use them I am not ignorant about the reality that they do the work well for people who chose to use them. Many people might see Sage as an upstart who will fail once it gets to the point of growth where the other systems are, but I would like to point out that on average patches from *28* people got patches into 2.10.x and 2.11 where the merge Window was less than two weeks each. So I am quite bullish about Sage and its growth potential. And I follow other CASes quite closely and I fail to see any other system where 25+ people contribute two in a two week cycle. Those 25+ people aren't the same by the way and in the last three months more than 70 people contributed patches to Sage. I checked that yesterday since we are updating the credit page. That "good enough wins" might not be ideal and/or fair, but we have to deal with reality. The goal of the Axiom project is well spelled out and since you are convinced that it is the right thing to do you should follow that path. But many of us disagree with your approach and the good thing about Open Source is that there is no "one size fits all approach." History might judge which approach will work out [and it can be *both*] and it is just the start of the race ;) > Tim Cheers, Michael --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
