On Nov 24, 6:54 am, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 1:15 AM, Florent Hivert > > > > > How do you imagine that one of those sharks could "put Sage down"?
they don't have to. they just ignore it. > I'm genuinely curious, because I don't see how *they* can. The > obvious attacks that come to mind are: > > * Sage is totally immune to what happened to Mupad, since the > copyright ownership of Sage is spread across hundreds of individuals. No, it's not. Say that William is refused NSF funding and other sources of support dry up. (Like Mupad's situation, I think). Someone says to him, isn't it possible to come up with a new really neat interface for Sage -- say a proprietary closed- source Windows version, for, say, a million dollars? And that can use the back-end free "sage- stuff" without violated GPL because sage is still there, separately, in the background. (I don't want to get into GPL discussion here, please). This is not to say it is likely, since I do not see anyone offering William a million dollars for this. And there are other implausibilities in the hypotheses as well. > > * A direct FUD attack would likely raise Sage's profile (since > people would wonder why Ma* is suddenly so worried). I imagine they are not worried, and they wouldn't bother. Did Mathematica attack Mupad? > > * A frivolous patent lawsuit. This could scare people and hurt > individuals. But is it a likely course of action by the Ma's, given > their past activities? Also, similar bullying against open source, > e.g., by SCO have not gone so well for the aggressors. So far as I can tell, only WRI engages in legal threats. Sage has no protection against suits, but it could happen. Let's say that someone writing one of those 100 components happens to have actually truly copied proprietary source code from somewhere. (You know, a student in a summer job, had access to <whatever>). Sage could be (quite reasonably) forced to remove (or rewrite) that piece. This might be a minor inconvenience. > > Now, having actually talked with people from at least Magma, > Mathematica, and Maple, I think the more likely attack is: > > * Work their assess off to innovate and create a better product. I think that they do not actually have to create a better product if they already have one, but putting that aside, they can just spend more money on marketing. > > It's an honest "attack", and that's exactly what I would expect from > the people working at the Ma's Depends on how you feel about marketing. My impression is that Sage people are very happy to do marketing, which includes a range of activities from announcements, puffery, innocent or deliberately misleading statements. . Perhaps, I'm young and naive, but I > think they are by and large good and honest people. I think you have had insufficient contact with the software marketing people. > I think this > sort of competition is an overall plus for end users, in the long run. Actually, there is an alternative view, at least as follows: Take the limited amount of funding from US and other governments, plus charities/foundations (like Clay), and say you want to "build the world's best mathematical system [whatever that means]". Which makes better sense to you: 1. For each of N persons who says "I want to build a competitive system from scratch" give that person 1/N of the available money and say "enter the competition". or 2. Encourage activity at the frontier: people who take the most advanced of the existing systems and push it further. Now William may consider that he is doing (2). I consider that, to the extent that he is encouraging the rewriting of existing code (in Python) it is more like (1). [Though re-using existing systems has aspects of (2)] RJF -- 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
