Florent Hivert wrote: > I'm not sure anyone in this sharks market will care a cent about putting sage > down...
I suspect some of the employees at Mathworks probably welcome Sage, though they would not say so officially. > Now, though I completely agree with sage goal, I don't feel very > comfortable with the motto: > "open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB." > > I clearly speaks about competition from the beginning... If Sages motto was "to put Mathworks, Wolfram Research & Maplesoft out of business", then I for one would not want to develop for Sage. <joke> The only good thing about Wolfram Research going out of business would be a dent in the ego of Steven Wolfram, but that is so large, I doubt anyone would notice</joke> What is so wrong about competition? In the UK, we have a 'competition commission' http://www.competition-commission.org.uk/ to ensure there is competition. It is seen by many as a good thing. There are two major aircraft manufactures - Boeing and Airbus. Each has an incentive to produce better planes, which are more fuel efficient, to win customers. Do you really think they would invest as much time in making planes more fuel efficient, if airlines had no choice but to buy from them? Would you not agree that competition between Intel and AMD forces each to spend money on R+D to win sales from the other? Does that not have a result that CPUs are better than they should be? Is the same not true of the producers of graphics cards? I know there was a discussion on here some time back that Mathematica's PrimePi[] was a bit quicker than Sages. But some Sage developers were aware of a faster algorithm. I'm not sure if that ever got implemented, but to beat Mathematica in this way can only be a good thing. No doubt Wolfram Research will respond. Competition is seen by many as a good thing most, though clearly if you are the leader in a market and customers have no choice but to go to you, then competition is the last thing you want. You would probably try to buy the competition, which is where the competition commission will step in, and sometimes blocks this. BAA has been forced to sell one of its London airports, as it delivers poor service and has no real incentive to do better as customers do not have any choice. There may be a 1001 reasons not to use Sage, but the fact it is competition with commercial producers of similar software is not one of them. Dave -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
