While the subject line is somewhat inflammatory, I respectfully disagree that civil discussion about Sage's relationship to other software projects, especially one so tightly coupled with Sage, belongs entirely on sage-flame. (Yes, debating the morality/legality of it belongs there, but recognizing that people are concerned about this is different.)
On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 4:45 PM, Dr. David Kirkby (Kirkby Microwave Ltd) <[email protected]> wrote: > > I think the whole closed source nature is likely to restrict the takeup of > Sage for several broad groups of people when they realise that to get high > performance they are going to need to store sensitive material on a Linux > server they don't control. I think there's some miss-understanding here, SMC is not about high performance, and the computational portion is no more distributed than what Sage provides alone, out of the box. > As a 50 year old engineer I have worked at three institutions who I know > would not want to put workbooks on a server outside their institution. > > a) Ministry of Defence - no way. > b) Airbus - no way. They are very strict on security. > c) Marconi - most unlikely. Not the target audience. > 1) Many commercial companies are not going to be so keen to put commercially > sensitive material on a server they don't control. Interlecural property is > valuable company asset. > > Suddenly buying distributed licenses for Mathematica is more attractive from > a security point of view. At least Wolfram Research can't look at what you > are doing. > > 2) Military users are very unlikely to start working on something on a > distributed system they can't totally control. > > 3) Some academics, especially those working on mathematics in areas they > know UW specialise in, would perhaps no want to put worksheets on a server > they know prying eyes will see. Why let someone else look at what you are > working on and possibly beat you to publish a paper? > > 4) Some individuals are just paranoid and will not use a distributed system > they don't control. > > No doubt HTTPS will be used to encrypt data in transit. Maybe worksheets > are stored in an encrypted format on disk. But at some stage the data going > to be in plain text. > > Has anyone working on SageMathCloud ever considered that certain users would > not want data stored in a manner they have no control over? Certainly. SMC is should not be in any way a prerequisite for using Sage. Clearly this isn't stated as explicitly as it should be. Another analogy: Externally hosted webmail lowers the barrier of entry for using email, but the additional cost and hassle of maintaining ones own email server (individually or otherwise) is the right alternative for those who are capable and value higher control over their own data. Frankly, most individuals (and many institutions) aren't very good at controlling their own setups, but some are and using Sage this way should always be available and provide the same core functionality. - Robert -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
