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William Stein on the struggle for open source funding in pure mathematics [pdf]

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Re: William Stein on the struggle for open source funding in pure mathematics [pdf]

#4

Post by Syzygies »

Bill Stein is a genius programmer, and Sage is quite the accomplishment. I wish he was more Chern, less Yau. I go to talks where people credit Sage where I know decades of Singular effort were responsible. (I coauthored a similar system; this is a life's work one is dismissing.) Sage was just the envelope, until he could replace the content, in this case unlikely to happen. I wish he was more interested in fixing this sort of user confusion. Draw your own conclusions.

Re: William Stein on the struggle for open source funding in pure mathematics [pdf]

#6

Post by aklemm »

Syzygies wrote: post #4

Bill Stein is a genius programmer, and Sage is quite the accomplishment. I wish he was more Chern, less Yau. I go to talks where people credit Sage where I know decades of Singular effort were responsible. (I coauthored a similar system; this is a life's work one is dismissing.) Sage was just the envelope, until he could replace the content, in this case unlikely to happen. I wish he was more interested in fixing thi…

Users pick full-featured, easy-to-use proprietary software over narrow-use OSS software with awkward UX all day. Stein had a grand vision to make the many OSS math tools actually preferable. I was in the room for a couple early Sage hackathons and the purpose seemed right on.

Re: William Stein on the struggle for open source funding in pure mathematics [pdf]

#7

Post by fjsolwmv »

Syzygies wrote: post #4

Bill Stein is a genius programmer, and Sage is quite the accomplishment. I wish he was more Chern, less Yau. I go to talks where people credit Sage where I know decades of Singular effort were responsible. (I coauthored a similar system; this is a life's work one is dismissing.) Sage was just the envelope, until he could replace the content, in this case unlikely to happen. I wish he was more interested in fixing thi…

Are you obliquely trying to say that Stein is plagiarizing others' work by not giving proper credit to the authors of components of Sage?

Re: William Stein on the struggle for open source funding in pure mathematics [pdf]

#9

Post by jordigh »

I still can't believe that they decided that the best use of their money to fund "open source" was just to give everyone Magma licenses. I hope they reconsider that choice some day.

Also, what is Fateman's problem? His constant negativity is really grating. I used to experience it when I was more involved with Maxima. I don't know if he thinks his cynicism is helpful or not, but all it ever did was make me unhappy.

Re: William Stein on the struggle for open source funding in pure mathematics [pdf]

#10

Post by williamstein »

Syzygies wrote: post #4

Bill Stein is a genius programmer, and Sage is quite the accomplishment. I wish he was more Chern, less Yau. I go to talks where people credit Sage where I know decades of Singular effort were responsible. (I coauthored a similar system; this is a life's work one is dismissing.) Sage was just the envelope, until he could replace the content, in this case unlikely to happen. I wish he was more interested in fixing thi…

I'm really sorry if some people credit Sage without properly crediting everything Sage depends on. We've gone out of our way to make the architecture of Sage clear. E.g., look at the description of Sage on our website: "SageMath is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It builds on top of many existing open-source packages: NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R and many more. Access their combined power through a common, Python-based language or directly via interfaces or wrappers." The "and many more" is a link to each component of Sage. I also often tried in talks to always define sage as: (1) a distribution of open source math software, and (2) a Python library that ties them together. Given the mostly volunteer nature of the project, many Sage developers are mostly concerned with creating software to support their research (which they then want to get back to), instead of worrying about the very important social points that you bring up.
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