On 5/28/07, Emil Volcheck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Thanks, David. > > I applaud your quick work. I've forwarded your message to the SIGSAM > Officers list as well as to our white paper committee. > > I'll get back to you with comments on your draft within two weeks. > > Thank you for including other open source computer algebra systems in > your list and not making it exclusively about SAGE. The tone as > I read it is that there are many good OSCAS worth funding, and > that SAGE is a good example of one. > > One comment I'd like to make right away: cut the footnote on the front > page. Keep Bob's fingerprints off this. It's better to let Bob > present this to his boss whatever way he feels like. If he wants to > present this as a spontaneous initiative from the community, and not > solicited by him, maybe it would have more credibility. I don't know. > But the footnote does not add any information that advances the thesis > of the white paper. BTW, one minor point: it's "ACM SIGSAM" > (no slash, no hyphen).
Will do. > > The primary motivation behind SIGSAM's white paper project is to > justify the importance, general utility, applicability of computer > algebra software and research. Your white paper starts from the > assumption that the reader knows about CAS and realizes why they are > important, at least by the very fact that they spend money on licenses > for commercial software. It's a different direction, with a > different starting point, and it's a good start. I can give examples of how important (for example) GAP has been to research in Riemann surfaces and William has examples of SAGE and modular forms/elliptic curves. This would get very technical very fast. Would that be useful? > > > A thought occurs to me. What I we filed a Freedom of > Information Act (FOIA) request for the total amount of NSF funding > that pays licenses for commercial computer algebra systems such as > Maple, Mathematica, and Magma? We should ask for this across all I think this is a great idea! > disciplines, including, say, engineering. That figure is a government > record subject to disclosure. We could also ask the DoE and NIH as > well, if we're feeling ambitious (but probably not the DoD). It would > provide some sort of baseline for comparison. So if we say, > "Dear NSF: since you're spending so much money on commercial > CAS, couldn't you please fund open source CAS at a rate of a dime > for every dollar you spend on commercial software?" This might > be relevant to the TCO argument that you are making. It would be very relevant, but FOI requests take 6+ months don't they? > > IMHO, SIGSAM should be willing to pay 500-1000 USD towards the FOIA > cost, because that information would be beneficial to the community. > > Maybe we need to devise a concept of "support license" for OSCAS by > which a researcher can voluntarily allocate part of their grant to > contribute to the development effort for OSCAS. I think of "support > license" as a term of art to mean a license that you buy to give you > the privilege of supporting the open source effort, as opposed > to a license that entitles you to receive support. > > --Emil > > > > On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 09:39:23PM -0400, David Joyner wrote: > > Hello Emil, SAGE developers: > > > > Following a suggestion of Emil Volcheck of ACM/SIGSAM and Bob Grafton > > of NSF, and William and I have drafted a "white paper" on NFS funding > > of mathematical software. It is at > > http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wdj/research/oscas-nsf-white-paper2.pdf > > Comments would be greatly appreciated. Please be as critical as you like. > > > > - David Joyner > > > -- > Emil Volcheck > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://acm.org/~volcheck > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
