Hello Bill,
I have to admit that answering your mail is more satisfying that
answering others. I started this thread to promote a needs_review
ticket (Eric Gourgoulhon went there since), but the thread became a
collection of attacks from people that cannot hear simple things like
"William makes money from Sage". Funnily, I am the one who is
considered as a troll here even when he created a for-profit company
(which would be sufficient in itself to make my claim).
At the very least, discussing it in long/constructed emails gives the
appearance of a more respectable activity. I surely can use that.
> Nathan, you started this thread with words like, "....help william earn more
> $$ than he has now ".
>
> You are making a claim here, that William is personally making money for
> himself from Sage. If you make the claim, it is up to you to prove the
> claim. So, what is your evidence that William is now paying himself money
> from SageMath Inc on top of his salary at the Uni of Washington? If you
> don't have any evidence of this, you don't have a right to make such
> complaints.
Technically, no I do not. It's not because he will be cashing money
next month or next year that he is not making money. He is making
money because he is getting paid subscription to a service whose main
contribution is to 'make Sage available'.
Now, he is also earning money as he said himself on the recent thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/45q7j1/sagemath_open_source_is_now_ready_to_compete_with/
Monthly recurring revenue is currently $5K and server costs are $3.5K.
1500$ is of the right magnitude for a salary: I'm paid 200euros a
months. If things go well, in some months he will be making by selling
an 'online Sage' as much as I do by working.... (partly on Sage, for
free).
He made the claim, however, that he had been losing money until now:
for this reason, it would not matter in the least if he were using
this money for himself as it would just cover what he already lost on
his personal money.
And then, some time from now, he will start earning a 'net benefit' in
the same way.
You will not know, I will not know (unless he makes it public), but
then he will start earning money off Sage, the product he 'makes
available'. You will probably agree with me on this point, for in the
second part of your email the points 1) 2) 3) are actually meant to
show that WIlliam *deserves* it. Because he started it, because he
currently sweats on it, etc..
I do not doubt that William sees it the same way: he started it, he
tries to promote it, he worked a lot on it, so why wouldn't he earn
money with it ? So it wouldn't be fair to tell me that I have no proof
that he is making personal money with it, when you yourself suggest
that:
1) He has the means
2) You think that it would be fair
Thus, I think that you and I agree on:
3) He will, when SMC will earn enough
My problem, here, lies in the other points you raised.
> Secondly, as you have worked out by now, SageMathCloud is not Sage.
You cannot say that, because here the confusion is deliberately maintained:
1) Sagemath.com is a SMC website
2) William's company is SageMath Inc.
I also remember a discussion about getting funding from some
association for Sage (which if I recall correctly ended up paying for
Mathematica licenses), when it was clear that the money would be spent
on SMC.
This very post, whose title is about Sage, turns out to be an
advertisement for SMC:
http://sagemath.blogspot.fr/2016/02/open-source-is-now-ready-to-directly.html
So no, you cannot say that "SageMathCloud is not Sage". Of course they
are different, but SageMathCloud's main advertised product is Sage.
And the name of the for-profit company is SageMath. And the website is
SageMath. Those are hints people have to take.
> SageMathCloud is a generic service for running Sage, R, Julia, writing PDF's
> collaboratively, and running a huge variety of other open source software. I
> personally have and pay for a SageMathCloud account. I have never used it,
> as far as I can recall, for running Sage. I have extensively used it for
> writing pdf's and have used it for running Julia, Flint and other things I
> work on.
This previous paragraph, I take as a convenient evasion of the truth.
Look at what SMC promotes, and you will see what they sell. The name
of the company is not JuliaCloud, and you cannot try to say that it is
a coincidence. William's blog posts are about Sage.
> 1) Sage is one of the pieces of software that can be run on SMC. The better
> Sage is, the more students will use Sage, and some of those users will use
> SMC. Some of them, or more likely their professors, will pay for SMC
> accounts. So improving Sage will very indirectly help increase the revenue
> SageMath Inc makes. So you are right on this point.
Thank you for conceding it.
> 2) SageMath Inc is William's company, even if he isn't currently paid a
> salary by that company and even if he is currently still trying to make back
> all the money he lost on SMC while it was getting started. But conceivably,
> SMC eventually does well enough that SageMath Inc might make enough money to
> pay William more than he is currently earning. Definitely possible. Just not
> happening now. So you are right on this point at some level.
Thank you.
> 4) He might be able to one day pay you more money to work for him than your
> (really) crappy University salary. Who knows, SageMath Inc might really
> become successful, and William might actually be able to hire people. Who do
> you think he will hire? Homeless people with no coding experience? No. Like
> Google he will hire recruiters to ring you up every year and ask you if you
> want to come and work for the multibillion dollar SageMath Inc conglomerate.
It may be odd to people at first, but I am not attracted to money or
to personal rewards. And the 'promise of a reward' does not tempt me
nor changes my opinion on what happens. Here, I do not complain that I
want a share of William's money. I complain that he is selling
somebody else's work.
It is very simple: you said that william started this thing, that he
worked a lot of it, that he has worked on it for years, spent nights
on it, that he had other things to do but found the time to work in it
still, that it became great in the end and that it is partly thanks to
him.
Yes. I agree with that. Totally.
But Sage is not William's. The same way that it is not mine. It would
not exist without William: it would not exist without all others who
contributed to it (and still do, though William stopped since). Except
for starting it, many of us have "worked on it for years, spent nights
on it, that he had other things to do but found the time to work in it
still, that it became great in the end and that it is partly thanks to
him".
William is not the sole author of Sage, and Sage is still being
developped. And you agreed that when I worked on it, I incidentally
contributed to his for-profit company.
That's my only point. We all sweated on Sage, to contribute to the
common good by working on a free software, sharing code useful to
others. We all do it for free and generously with our time, but
William is now trying to convert this free generous collective work
into cash.
> My advice to you would be this. If you really feel strongly about this, do
> not contribute anything at all to SMC. Keep working on Sage and pushing it
> forward, but have nothing to do with William's company. Just work on the
> Open Source software you love, which William is NOT selling, and just refuse
> to have anything to do with the company William is running, which is making
> all the money for him.
"SageMath Inc's main (paying) product is to make Sage available" (as
is obvious from the name and advertisement of this company". I will
keep on saying that SageMath cloud sells Sage, even if it does not
distributes tarballs but makes it available through a website for
those who don't want to install it themselves.
I cannot ignore the fact that by improving Sage I create added value
for SageMath Inc (for-profit company), and so I will restrain from
certain kinds of improvements in Sage. I will keep on working on the
[Graph Theory/LinearProgramming/Combinatorial Designs/Hypergraphs]
librairies as I did for years, which I need and love. But as I said
previously, I was tempted to improve the documentation that is the
most important to novice users who meet Sage as a general-purpose CAS
and this I will not do anymore, only because SageMath Inc exists.
And I will contribute this time to some other thing that nobody tried
to capitalize on yet.
Nathann
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