I hope they improve their software development practises. Packaging SageMath for Debian has been impossible; they use about 100 dependencies and have re-invented their own internal package manager to build all of these with sage-specific patches.
The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
101–110 of 202 posts
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see. I've always thought of sage as ipython+sympy+numpy+matplotlib+scipy ... sort of an enthought type of deal.
sagemath is such a distribution, but also a rather thick layer of algorithms on top of that. many of them are actually written in cython, to make them fast and to have a good binding with those libraries, etc.
Also a syntax pre-parser to support more "standard" mathematical notation (one among the many: exponentiation using ^)
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
He has a higher risk tolerance than me. I would work on this 80% and do the 20% required stuff as a tenured professor, but what do I know. Maybe I am overly enamored with becoming a tenured professor. If he was already spending his time as a professor working on this, I don't understand the difference. Still, all the best and good luck to him.
If you do the bare minimum work as a tenured professor you're going to get an awful lot of people extremely mad at you at all levels of the academic hierarchy.
If you do the bare minimum work and you're spending a lot of time on your own company, at my university, you will almost certainly get a pink slip. Doesn't matter if you have tenure. We are not allowed to work more than one day a week on such things, and that requires approval, which probably won't happen if we're not publishing, have terrible teaching evaluations, and aren't doing a full share of service and advising.
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is great! What will be the source of revenue? Dual-license? Support?
It's explained here. Sage itself is 100% open source, but we have a cloud hosted environment people can pay (a very reasonable amount) to use. https://cloud.sagemath.com/policies/pricing.html
You should look into support contracts for 2 reasons:
1) A lot of companies have policies against using software that they cannot buy support contract for (regardless of the quality of the support)
2) if there is an individual/small buzz reasonable option, a lot of companies and people like to pay for it as a way to given financial support.
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#105I hope they improve their software development practises. Packaging SageMath for Debian has been impossible; they use about 100 dependencies and have re-invented their own internal package manager to build all of these with sage-specific patches.
I just tried to get a binary to install it on Windows. Instead they are handing out only OVM files (VirtualBox images.) As much as they might despise closed-source, there are simple things that businesses necessitate - like not being hostile to your audience. I am a fucking programmer, I don't have a problem using VirtualBox. At the same time, it infuriates me that they did not bundle up an MSI or EXE for their windows audience. Now I feel less inclined to even try it, because I already use Mathematica. This basic understanding of "energy to demo something" is the ethos of HN. I am super surprised after reading that PDF to find these simple energy laws of consumerism violated. Aye...I digress...
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#106Good luck and Godspeed!
Academia totally sucks in this deeply ingrained ivory-tower mindset that metes out rewards/tenure/grants based on outdated performance metrics.
(Excuse the vitriol, former academic here.)
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#107It's SHAMEFUL that academics like Stein who dedicate their lives to developing amazing open-source software do not get funding and frequently fail to get tenure. These individuals truly are making the world better!
See the before-the-last slide Academia values mindless papers over actual results.
To be clear, this is a side effect of using publication count as a surrogate for an individual's total contributions to an academic field. Everyone knows this is the metric for success, so you either have to optimize for it, or risk looking like a failure.
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, no. They are not at all alike. Stephen Wolfram has a lot more _people skills_ than Sheldon Cooper. Sheldon Cooper is the stereotype of the Asperger scientist who succeeds despite his inability to interact with people, while Stephen Wolfram has been at the helm of a tech company for 30+ years, and that's not something you can really do without having to interact with other people.
An acquaintance who worked directly for him would disagree with you.
People liking you and being able to work with people are not the same thing; possible I misunderstood you, but not clear to me.
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Setting up a company can help because it will let other researchers support the project by buying the software on research grants." This is absolutely correct, and has happened many times now in the last few months (I started the company itself a year ago).
By the way, another way to get financial support for an open source project is to sell a short tutorial book. For example, the creator of Laravel did this on Leanpub (disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Leanpub) and did pretty well: https://leanpub.com/laravel is #7 in lifetime earnings on Leanpub. (Also, one of the core contributors on Laravel has done even better: https://leanpub.com/codebright is #2 in lifetime earnin…
“Given that writing good English is a rare skill among programmers, we can ill afford to lose manuals this way.”
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why when Big Bang Theory debuted, I thought Sheldon Cooper was specifically supposed to be a parody of Stephen Wolfram. In math, how you came by the results you came by is always relevant. Don't tell mathematicians they don't need to know that. It's their job to know that.
Well, no. They are not at all alike. Stephen Wolfram has a lot more _people skills_ than Sheldon Cooper. Sheldon Cooper is the stereotype of the Asperger scientist who succeeds despite his inability to interact with people, while Stephen Wolfram has been at the helm of a tech company for 30+ years, and that's not something you can really do without having to interact with other people.
I suspect Wolfram also succeeds despite the nature of his people skills. I found this letter from Feynmann[1] to be an interesting and early read on his behavior.
[1]: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/06/you-dont-understand-ord...