Sorry for the delay, had a quarrel with myself about it. On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 3:02 AM, Thierry <sage-googlesu...@lma.metelu.net> wrote: >> What's the spirit of the Sage project? It's mission statement? > > The mission statement is about a "free open source alternative", which SMC > is not.
True, SMC's mission statement is as different one. One of the two is about *creating* a mathematical software system, the other one about actually *running* mathematical software online (aka "cloud"). SMC has the mission to accomplish this for the scientific Python stack, R, octave, M2, GAP, and of course Sage. To make the distinction even more clear: there is no goal of explicitly implementing a mathematical concept in SMC. Rather, it is all about boring non-mathematical stuff like UI, backup, backend administration, distributed databases etc. > The user-base could be even larger if every university (or whatever) could > host its own local cloud and freely adapt it (e.g. translations, ldap > interface, ...). Could be, yes, but given the existing circumstances this is not the case and such a system doesn't fall from the sky. Therefore my statement is true and your "could be even larger" outside the feasible realm. It's a nice wish-to-have, yes. I'm also all in for cooking up another software project, which is an SMC-like open-source equivalent. > By the closed-source nature of SMC, the University of Washington can > impose moral considerations to the users of SMC : if UW considers that > some user does not use SMC in a moral way, it can delete its account, and > the user will not be able to connect elsewhere to still enjoy its > features. > Well, I have a two-part answer to this: Imagine everything of SMC is fully free software. Even in this case, the entity providing the service would terminate a user's account if the user would start doing bad things, e.g. criminal activities. So, your "closed-source" implication is also true in the "free-software" case. Given my previous statement is wrong, and the operators would be - due to the free-software nature of the service you are providing - unable to restrict access of malicious users violating the TOS agreement, this would be a strong argument for not disclosing any of the platform's software! (Besides that, I don't think that's true … I suspect I would be already aware of this.) >> My core argument is, that merely >> implanting Sage in different environments doesn't diminish its value or >> functionality. > > The environments could be even more diverse if SMC was free software and > widely spread, its quality could be improved if it could be run on various > clusters. Same "could be" argument, see above. > > Your arguments are good, but they all support the open-sourcing of SMC, > which was Dave's point (if i understand correctly). I'm not against open sourcing SMC, I don't know why you have come to that conclusion. Above, you brought up an interesting point, which (if true) would support closing up all cloud services even more. > >> Finally, if you do not like SMC, ignore it. > > As long as there is a huge advertising of SMC on the sagemath.org front > page, … this is not really possible. So, it's about the banner. That's certainly an fine line which we can discuss. My understanding of advertising is that others pay you for space on your website. That didn't happen. To me, the rationale is rather the opposite: by promoting a way to access and use Sage more easily, it is increasing its awareness, colleges talk about it, blogposts happen, etc. An increased adoption of Sage is beneficial for it, because developers are proportional to the user-base. … and even better, Sage development can be done on SMC, too. Hence in my eyes this banner actually helps Sage. Going through the Sage website with your definition of "advertising", we would also have to get rid of smaller things as well. For example: [1] The author of this product most certainly earned some income with it. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Cryptography-Open-Source-Mathematics-Applications/dp/143982570X/ > and since the development of SMC is (partially) funded by the Sage > foundation (whose aim is "To support the development of the mathematical > software system SAGE."), I don't know much about this since I'm not part of it. The larger question is the dependency of Sage on UW in general. By stating that, I'm not implying that I want to get rid of UW in that equation, but rather introduce new moving parts supporting Sage. An European-based foundation (NPO), strengthening ties to EU universities, etc. -- H -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
