This is a prime example of the tragedy of the commons with FOSS. People wonder what academic or corporate incentives need to change, but I'd argue in many cases this work lies between research and business and that's OK. I think the closest physical-world analogue is civil engineering of public works, and we'd be wise to make something of this (in the US they perhaps both underfunded, hmmm).
The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
151–160 of 202 posts
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
By definition of positive ROI, the university has more money than before, which in particular means it can spend more money on research by building football stadia. On the wider scale, extracurriculars only affect[2] share-of-students rather than increase the total number of students[1], so such programs have a globally negative ROI. But each individual university is making a rational decision. [1] I'm assuming there…
You're assuming that the ROI generated by football isn't a transfer from other universities who lose students to the spending uni. More likely, funding football is a zero sum game which generates no overall benefit for the research community.
That's what I said in my second sentence.
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#153The video is now on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eIoYMB_0Xc
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#154All too familiar. I am reminded why I stopped writing software for academic research. It's considered low-academic-value work, on a par with system administration or I.T. helpdesk work.
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#155I 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.…
OK, more accurately I should have said "much much more cost than is necessary", instead of "impossible".
The point is that, it should not cost significant continual effort to package SageMath for Debian: if SageMath was following good engineering practises, then Tim Abbott's work would still function today, even taking into account necessarily but normal and minimal maintenance costs that Debian volunteers (including myself) would be happy to do for Sage.
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most academics do not get funding or tenure. Most funded academic mathematicians lose funding at some point. The funding rate for NSF grants in mathematics is certainly less than 33%, and one can only submit a standard proposal once per year. The competition is FIERCE. (I've been on panels: it is terrifying to see who doesn't get funded.) Ask any mathematician -- theorem prover or software writer -- about excellent p…
Mathematicians who write software are no more likely to be "truly making the world better" than those who prove theorems and teach hundreds or thousands of students every year. How can this be true in the case of a mathematician who writes something that many/most of the others use?
It follows by transitivity!
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#157This story reminds me of Prof. Tim Davis of Texas A&M, formerly Florida, who I heard had a hard time getting tenure, after making the software and mathematical world a much better place. He (and his group) developed CHOLMOD and UMFPACK and other sparse solvers used everywhere. Basically, when you type A/b in Matlab, it calls his code. It was an incredibly challenging task going from sort-of/kind-of being able to solv…
> when you type A/b in Matlab x = A\b gives the solution to Ax=b, and x=b/A gives the solution to xA=b. But when would you type A/b ?
He definitely meant backslash.
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#158This story reminds me of Prof. Tim Davis of Texas A&M, formerly Florida, who I heard had a hard time getting tenure, after making the software and mathematical world a much better place. He (and his group) developed CHOLMOD and UMFPACK and other sparse solvers used everywhere. Basically, when you type A/b in Matlab, it calls his code. It was an incredibly challenging task going from sort-of/kind-of being able to solv…
> when you type A/b in Matlab x = A\b gives the solution to Ax=b, and x=b/A gives the solution to xA=b. But when would you type A/b ?
He definitely meant backslash.
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#159I 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.…
More details here: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/Sage
It would be great if you do pay someone to work on this, but please also keep in mind my points about continual costs. To reduce these, Sage upstream (you) does have to change some of its practises.
Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
#160Mr Stein released the first version of SageMath some time ago--not sure how long but maybe 2007.
among other things, SageMath reconciled the confusing namespace soup that is scientific python (numpy, scipy, and matplotlib--three brilliant libraries with partial overlap in functionality and in package names) which SageMath gathered (along with other libraries like SymPy) and put them under a single rubric, 'SageMath'--one (large) install and you have all of scientific python.
SageMath also included a notebook
seems not such a big deal now with Anaconda and Jupyter notebook, but in 2007 it certainly was.