> I'm also curious about honest *opinions* about how people in the Sage > community would feel about a company making potentially gobs of money > selling support contracts? What balance between profit and giving > back to the community would be appropriate? What services might be > offensive, and what would be OK? > > For example: > > * I could see how some people might be annoyed if there were a Sage > version of EPD (http://www.enthought.com/products/epd.php) that fully > supported Windows (say), even though Sage didn't, and cost > $199/license. On the other hand, perhaps a $199 Sage-for-Windows > might be better than no-sage-at-all for Windows for free.
Funding always has the upside and the downside. One upside is that you could afford to pay someone to actually do porting and support work. As you know, there are a lot of tasks that rarely get done because they are just not interesting enough to do. I spend a week every two months on porting and platform issues. With funds coming in you could set up a limited liability corp to manage negotiation with schools, etc. The downside is that you begin to compete with MMA, Maple, etc. commercially. Can Sage compete on a level playing field? If I am going to give my research away should I write it in Sage or MMA? Which one will give me a larger audience? There is the question about where the profit would go. If I do the research and you make the money it seems a little out of balance. There might be limitations on "free". For instance, a Windows port might use proprietary software to make Sage run well on Windows. There are a few people in Sage who are quite passionate about GPL-ish issues and this might lead to a fork. Redhat seems to have walked the thin line but they always styled themselves as a service company. They did a lot to support the community. Eventually they ended up with a deliberate split of redhat vs fedora. Would you end up with a "Sage vs Wage" split? > > * I'm curious if something like sagenb.org, but with Google ads, > would be offensive. I could see somebody starting a small business > that is just public notebook servers that also have ads. > > I haven't personally made up my mind about any of this. > > -- William > -- 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
