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.
In 2007, Tim Abbott (before founding ksplice and zulip) beautifully and properly packaged Sage for Debian, and in fact Sage was included in Debian standard! Unfortunately, he stopped working on the project (when he started those projects), and of course we had no money to hire somebody else to maintain what he did. If I had money, it would be a total no brainer to spend it on supporting packaging SageMath for Debian. Your remarks about it being impossible because of our package manager and dependencies aren't correct, because things we the same in 2007.
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.
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 windo…
I'm sorry. The point of my talk is that Sage is not a viable alternative to Mathematica, etc., for many reasons, e.g., not having a native Windows version. Porting a huge amount of deep technical software from Linux to Windows is the sort of difficult and thankless work that will not get somebody tenure in academia. I tried hard to get funding to get help on a Windows port, and Microsoft donated $30K for this effort back in 2008. However, $30K is not enough to fund such a huge project. In fact, I once met with a bunch of the revolution analytics devs, and learned they were getting millions from Microsoft just to port R to run natively on Windows. This was disturbing, because R is just one of the 100 components of Sage. In my talk, I mentioned the new grant in Europe that is funding the first ever fulltime Sage employee, and it turns out his main job so far is working on a native Windows port of Sage. Unfortunately, though he is incredibly good, he'll probably discover how daunting this project really is. (It's not a one guy for a few months sort of project... And yes, I tried very hard once to port Sage to Windows and failed.)
This is why I love sagemath, and open source in general. I cloned the repo a few weeks ago after hearing him mention how he is mainly the sole developer. It's a huge undertaking and i know how draining something like that can be for motivation. I may not have time to do a lot but i am gonna join in and help as much as possible. Documentation, bug fixes, whatever. This project deserves it imo
Minor clarification -- I'm definitely not "mainly the sole developer" of Sage. There are over a hundred people that have contributed to Sage during the last year, and our release manager (not me) works very hard putting together these releases. I did most of the work on SageMathCloud though...
Will, I have been looking for ways to build a company around GNU Octave too. If you find a way to make money, please let me know. Matlab is one of the Ma's that needs a direct replacement. There's so much free Matlab code out there that needs a free environment to run on.
Hi Jordi! Here's what we are doing: https://cloud.sagemath.com/policies/pricing.html
I have so far found a way to loose money. However, I hope that if we can grow usage sufficiently that we'll start making money. You and I are on the same team.
And hundreds of thousands of lines of new code not available anywhere else written by over 500 mathematicians over the last decade...
Those lone software new code are bound to sage, not separable Python modules?
Yes, they are bound to sage. I really, really want to break things apart into separate Python modules that can be used outside Sage. However, that's an enormous amount of work that doesn't help at all with finishing a math research paper, so it's unlikely to happen without money. I've proposed and brought up exactly this very frequently on the Sage mailing lists in the last year. If the company makes money, one my dreams is that all of Sage will be available as smaller modules that are pip installable....
I wonder if a simplified variant of SageMath / SageMathCloud would make sense as a Sandstorm app. IPython on Sandstorm is a generally excellent experience, and the sage notebook is a similar concept.
If you're reading this @WilliamStein, firstly, kudos for the whole effort. I think the providing Sage as cloud math software is a powerful strategy, especially with the trend of end users preferring low power devices. I have some thoughts regarding the comment on Slide15 (making Sage good for some applications): I see that python and Jupyter are very popular for machine learning and allied computations. Can SAGE leve…
I'm reading this. The business model of the company is basically exactly what you're suggesting. Yes, there is very strong coherence between the leaders of Sage and Jupyter. (The founder of Jupyter is just to the right near the back in the picture of Sage Days 1 in slide 16...)
I have tried for a while now, and I thought I could do both. But... (1) It is difficult on a personal level--for example last month SageMathCloud got hit by a major DDOS attack 15 minutes before I had to teach a class. I have family and though I love to work, there are only so many hours in a day. (2) There I am at a big old state university, and there are many complicated byzantine conflict of interest and IP rules,…
Why not take a leave of absence to at least get the company started and acquire some funding? After that, you could just have a consulting role with the company.
I did during my 2014-2015 sabbatical. Building a successful company is vastly more difficult and demanding of attention than I could have imagined. Maybe I'm just not as good at doing multiple difficult things at once as other people.
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 advisin…
This is precisely correct. And even if I could get away with it, I would not feel that it is morally right (for me at least).
Good luck to William. I have another perspective though; I knew Allan Steel (Magma guy) as an undergrad at Sydney University. He is an extraordinarily smart person and humble and genial as well. Everyone should be thankful to him and the University of Sydney for having the wisdom to fund the development of Magma.
Allan Steel is awesome!! I really like him and have learned so much from him -- it's one reason I put his picture up for Magma in that slide. (I think you might be overestimating the extent to which U Sydney funds development of Magma.)