On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 6:55 AM, Dr. David Kirkby
<david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote:
> 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.
This is current active work in progress by two UW Undergraduates:
Kevin Stueve and Andrew Ohana.
See
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/7013
The last activity on that ticket was a day ago.
> 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
>
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