Hi!
For whatever two cents it's worth, here is my modest analysis of the
situation and how I'll try to contribute to tackle this.
I am using the same metric as William: is Sage becoming a viable
alternative to XXX. However, by this, I don't mean that it should
completely take over the niche and bring its competitor to bankruptcy.
Nor even that it should take over a large proportion of the
niche. Just that Sage shall be good enough for most users in the niche
to have the real choice to use it. Or to use something else.
To this respect, I think Sage is doing quite well. For example, many
universities in France are progressively switching to Sage, both for
research and education. Better, our national competition that recruits
math teachers for high schools -- whose training include some non
trivial computer algebra -- have recently ruled out non open source
software for its oral exams, when they used to be mostly
Maple/Mathematica/Matlab based. Maybe our book [1] contributed a tiny
bit to this. At least, it's by writing it that we convinced ourselves
that Sage was already a non perfect but viable alternative for
education.
Maybe this difference of appreciation with William just stems from
different expectations. I can understand William's frustration that
things are not going as fast as he would have dreamed it to be. Yet,
nine years ago, when I read the Sage mission statement, I thought it
was extraordinary bold. In fact, from past experience, I was
originally giving peanuts to Sage's success, and I thought that
William had no idea of the difficulty of the endeavor. Well, ever
since then, I have been super glad to have been proven wrong :-) And
even though I am often frustrated that things are going slow, I am
neither surprised nor disappointed.
Altogether, the development model, developed by users for users, is
mostly doing the job. However there are some areas that have been
mentioned here (packaging&distribution, documentation, notebook,
graphics, ...) that are lagging behind because it's too technical to
do be taken care of as a side product of the daily job of users.
To get around this, I believe we need to externalize as much as we can
to larger communities (e.g. transition quickly from the Sage notebook
to the IPython notebook, use pip, ...) *and* find funding for a few
full-time developers.
William believes in SMC to drive in such funding. I am not necessarily
convinced by some aspects of the strategy, but I am glad he is
exploring this potential opportunity. The situation is complicated,
and we don't know for sure what's the right approach; probably there
are several complementary ones. Anyone with a vision should just try
hard and follow his beliefs.
On my side, I am going to coordinate a European grant application
(submission: January 2015) around the Sage ecosystem (including GAP,
Pari, ...), with main goal to fund a couple full time devs over the
next few years:
https://github.com/sagemath/grant-europe
I have honestly no idea of the odds of success. Probably low, although
we do fit quite well within the call; riding the open wave is
fashionable these days. So let's just be bold. The other challenge
will be to find good candidates for such developer positions.
If you'd be interested in participating, please get in touch and
join. If you'd be potentially interested in becoming a full time Sage
dev in Europe (or associated country) for a couple years, please
contact me as well.
For information: we will have a preparatory meeting for this grant
application on September 8-9th in Orsay. Feel free to join.
Cheers,
Nicolas
[1] http://sagebook.gforge.inria.fr/
PS for William: please be super careful with wording. Referees of
grant applications will look around to access the value of Sage and
its chances of success.
--
Nicolas M. Thiéry "Isil" <nthi...@users.sf.net>
http://Nicolas.Thiery.name/
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