On Nov 24, 6:55 am, "Dr. David Kirkby" <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: ..... > > What is so wrong about competition? In the UK, we have a 'competition > commission' > > http://www.competition-commission.org.uk/
Since Sage is given away, Sage makes no money when more people use it. I think the analogy with Boeing and Airbus is not as good as you suppose. How do you feel about "competition" between 2 organizations attempting to give away the same thing, more or less? Does that improve the product? (I have not followed in detail, but there may be an example in the fork of Emacs code to several products. All free?) Does the existence of "A new front end for Maxima written in -- tada-- python" competing with "A new front end for Maxima written in --tada--X11" competing with .. TCL ..., OpenGraphics, ... etc etc ... actually improve Maxima? While such a competition is relatively harmless when it occupies one person (who is an enthusiastic programmer in some graphics package) for a brief time, and typically that person doesn't know much about Maxima or math, and it involves potentially interesting design issues that are still in turmoil in the user-interface community --- it could become unproductive if many people are encouraged to (say) spend their time duplicating complicated algorithms, or worse, writing naive versions of complicated algorithms -- that do not quite do the hardest stuff -- . That kind of competition is not helpful, in my view. 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
