> On 5/28/07, Emil Volcheck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > 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.
Some variant of this is definitely worth thinking about much more, since
it is one of the standard models for open source software (which is
now tried and tested, and does work if one is providing a genuinely
useful service). For example, we could officially sell support
for SAGE at the bronze ($100/year), silver ($500/year), gold
($1000/year) or platinum ($5000/year) level. The researcher
or institution purchasing this support would
send that amount of money to the SAGE foundation. As far as their
accountants are concerned it would be no different than buying
any other software license (and I've bought numerous software
licenses with my university money before -- it's easy).
In return purchases would get:
(1) a warm fuzzy feeling,
(2) some very nice posters to hang around their departments,
(3) listed on this web page as an official financial supporter
of the SAGE project:
http://www.sagemath.org/ack.html
(being listed would be optional)
(4) students or conferences whose work is funded through
that particular money could be listed next to their name, e.g.,
Justin Walker -- $1000 -- partially supported SAGE Days 17 and
one undergrad student project
on binomial sums.
SAGE developers would notice who is listed in (2), and -- completely
voluntarily -- choose to possibly be even more helpful to such people when
they post on sage-support, etc. (I think the help people get already on
the sage-* lists probably already exceeds what Mathematica/Maple/etc
provide, especially for research-related questions.) In fact, if I received
5 gold licenses, I could hire a grad student, e.g. Robert Bradshaw,
to spend 19.5 hours a week every week just answering support
questions. In fact, two UW grad students (including Robert) are going
to work next year for that amount of time and money to answer math
department computing help support requests instead of teaching.
Interesting -- selling 20 gold licenses a year would be enough to fully
fund a grad student to answer help requests. And if everything goes
through a foundation, that person could be at a university anywhere.
I.e., one could imagine that instead of TA'ing two calculus courses, some
of the top SAGE developer grad students would receive a SAGE scholarship
to answer support questions for 19.5/hours a week. I certainly would
have preferred that some of the time to teaching calculus as a grad student.
I'd love to hear some feedback on this suggestion from grad students,
since my impression is that most SAGE developers are grad students.
SUMMARY: Sell SAGE support, but in practice allow anybody to take
advantage of the support even if they don't pay. Numerous people might
pay because they really just want to use grant funds that they have
available (or can obtain from NSF or other agencies) to support SAGE.
And we don't really need that many people to pay in order to make
this really pay off for SAGE.
This is a very preliminary proposal, and shouldn't be taken at all seriously
without lots of discussion. What is serious is that a steady stream of
support is critical to take SAGE from where it is now to being a truly
viable alternative to Magma/Maple/Mathematica/MATLAB. The same
has been true of many open source projects, e.g., Firefox, Python, Linux,
etc.,; many of the people who work on those projects are paid to do
that work.
-- William
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