On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 1:16 PM, Vincent Delecroix <20100.delecr...@gmail.com> wrote: > thought was that Sage is a math software, open source, with the aim of > being a viable alternative to Ma*. There was no mention of a cloud > which is just the incompatible with the open source project (as the > FSF defines it).
Why do you think that the existence of "a cloud" that provides an additional way to use Sage is compatible with Sage being an open source project? To me that's no different than claiming that the existence of websites running on servers running Linux is incompatible with Linux being an open source project. > My very personal opinion is that the cloud is a bad > way of making Sage popular: it makes the users dependent of a service. If good = "not dependent" and bad = "dependent", then indeed it is bad. I do not define good and bad that way. I'm more concerned with providing valuable services to people, making it easier for people to get work done, and providing ways to collaborate. I want to grow the community of users of open source math software, and I'm probably not the first person to realize that a website-based approach is a powerful tool for addressing some of these goals. > Up to now, I learned a lot with Sage and I hope that I contributed > equivalently on teaching with it, going to Sage days, contributing > with my code, etc. Sage was for me part of the public domain. If the > cloud really becomes the main way of using Sage it will be for me like > a dispossession. The cloud implies > - the obligation of using the cloud to share code > - no control on the execution of the softwares > - no direct access to the source code > - no way to use your own editor These are all valid concerns for anybody choosing whether or not to use Sage (or anything else) via any computer that isn't their own personal computer. Even if a large number of people were to someday use Sage via the cloud, this doesn't mean that everybody does. You can -- and will *always* be able to -- use Sage in any way you want (compatible with the GPL). If many more people are using Sage (in any way, cloud or not), then the number of contributions to Sage itself will increase, the quality of Sage goes up, getting support for Sage development gets easier, etc., which will mean that your personal cloud-free use of Sage will be improved. Everybody wins in the Sage community wins. User attention is a zero-sum game (unless there are new markets), so somebody has to loose in this scenario--it isn't us Sage users -- it's the Ma*'s. Today there are n ways to use Sage. I hope tomorrow there will be n+1 ways to use Sage. If anybody out there can think of any new ways of making any form of open source math software more accessible, I think we should all strongly encourage them. > Moreover, using some energy to develop the cloud really prevents from > having other important Sage projects going on. I don't know how to respond to this, since there are a lot of implicit assumptions that you're making to deduce some conclusion. It's like saying "I'm assuming a bunch of things I don't mention are true. Hence [some statement]." Sometimes it is a good idea to invest in new directions that have a potentially big payoff. The odds are probably at best 1 in a 100, but in the long run https://cloud.sagemath.com could provide substantial funding that will increase the potential for other important open source math software projects to happen. I can think of numerous skilled professional software engineers with math Ph.D.'s who would love to work fulltime on core Sage development work if there were any way they could be paid a salary that is comparable to what they get working in industry. Unfortunately, without the level of support that would come from a successful company, I see no way that we'll have even one single fulltime professional working on Sage longterm. I don't think Sage *needs* such development effort, but I think we can all agree that Sage would benefit from it. I also think that professional customer support, which is something that by definition only a company can provide, should be viewed as a central part of the mission statement of Sage: "provide a viable ... alternative to Mathematica, Maple...". Paid support is probably not important for anybody reading this message -- we're a few thousand core highly technical developers -- but its existence is critical to any "viable alternative" when you grow way beyond 10,000 users. As an example, R -- which is the only open source math software to go truly mainstream -- has good commercial support available. > I am not an extremly active developer of Sage nor actively involved in > Sage politics. Nevertheless, I am a Sage enthousiasts and try to > spread it as much as I can. Fundings is definitely an important > problem. Could somebdoy help me on the following two questions > - how is decided where the money of the Sage fundation goes ? I decide often in consultation with other Sage developers. The bulk of contributions to the Sage Foundation are earmarked for a specific purpose, e.g., "fund this workshop" or "fund the Jaap Spies Sage Development Prize this year". The Sage Foundation budget is a small proportion of the total funding that has been used for Sage development. The bulk of Sage funding has been by the NSF (and other institutes, in both the US and Europe) in the form of workshops and some summer support (but always in combination with some other research objective). > - is there a public access to the incomes and outcomes of the Sage fundation > ? No. > From my french viewpoint Sage is spreading. From this year Ma* are not > anymore allowed for the main teachers recruitment examination and Sage > is precisely one of the alternative. This implies that many > universities in France will switch from Ma* to Sage. This goes > slowly... but safely. I'm very happy to hear about this, and everything I've seen strongly suggests that Sage is doing well in France. That said, I have to face the unfortunate reality that judging by website visit and download numbers, the Sage project is simply not growing much overall in usage. >>> I do not want to start a flame or attack anyone, and i have absolutely no >>> problem with the fact that a company host a cloud running Sage (and even >>> donate some income to Sage). >> >> A company doesn't host a cloud running Sage, and there is no income. >> That said, after getting funding in various ways over 8 years for this >> project, I think the only hope Sage has of breaking into mainstream >> usage is with such a commercial component. This is why I hope to >> create such an entity when there is appropriate technology and a >> business model. > > Ok. But that is a personnal point of vue. I thought that Sage was the > project of 400 developers and thousands of users... I have a different perspective. For the first year it was the project of one developer and one user: me; but a project that is built on top of the work of hundreds of other developers. For the second year, it was the product of 3 developers and 3 users (me, David Kohel, and David Joyner). For the third year, there were a few more developers/users. Etc. Now I'm happy that there are around 400 developers listed on trac. And I'm happy to have set things up so that we all share the copyright on Sage, and no individual pr company can automatically control the future of the Sage program (e.g., there can never be a dual-licensed closed source version). But *any* company who wants to can, at any time, take Sage the program and use it as a backend for a website. And that website could have millions of users. If Google wanted to have millions of people doing complicated calculations you type in the search bar get evaluated using Sage, they could, without paying any of us 400+ developers one penny. That's completely legal, and in no way circumvents the GPL or Sage being an open source project. And by using the GPL, we developers are making a legal statement that we understand and support this. If you replace "Sage" by "Linux" in the above paragraph, and "millions" by "billions", you have what is really happening every day. Also, I would like you to consider many of your concerns above with "Sage" replaced by "Linux". Is it so bad that billions of people are using websites that are backed by the GPL'd program "Linux"? No -- this is one of the reasons that Linux (at least at the server at smartphone level) gets so much development support. -- William -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. 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