161–170 of 202 posts
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These projects are a crucial part of the infrastructure of the modern information society. The solution to a lack of funding for these things is not charity from rich patrons, but governmental investment based on taxes.
I tend to disagree. The government incentives are aligned toward large long term investments, not individual DaVincis or Galileos
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What you are describing is the status quo, but it is certainly possible for government to fund software development. As William points out in his presentation, it is already being done indirectly through software license purchases. I think it would be interesting to see what academics could achieve if they were offered some modest grants aimed at developing and maintaining viable open-source alternatives to all comme…
"I think it would be interesting to see what academics could achieve if they were offered some modest grants aimed at developing and maintaining viable open-source alternatives to all commercial software" I think this would be a waste of academics. Commercial software is not expensive (mostly) because of some secret sauce. It's because delivering a functioning product requires lots of work that is thoroughly mundane…
I am not suggesting that the government should be involved in making pencils. But I do think funding independent development of open tools for research, education and other government-funded work is a good idea.
To support my claim, compare the cost of healthcare in the US, where the government relies on the industry to keep medical products and services cheap, with the price in countries where the government provides its citizens with an alternative.
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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.
Although my personal work is more focused on Windows support for the time being, this is definitely on the docket. We had a workshop about two months ago in France focused specifically on packaging Sage, and there are some excellent folks from LogiLab who are making serious progress on the Debian packing. I hope to circle back around to that myself after I've made more progress on Windows.
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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.
This is also being worked on and there's progress being made.
I'm still pushing to completely separate Sage-the-library from Sage-the-distribution. There's been a little pushback but nothing that can't be overcome with basic configuration management practices.
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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…
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.)
SageMathCloud is amazing: https://cloud.sagemath.com/ , for those that want to try it out. Lots of neat bonus features like Python notebooks, Latex support, and even terminal access. The free tier works great for most applications.
Basic interface with no requirement to log in, mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. Probably best for 'calculator' mode tryouts.
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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.
I'm actually one of the few people being paid to work on Sage, and this is one of the tasks I have interest in. Although my personal work is more focused on Windows support for the time being, this is definitely on the docket. We had a workshop about two months ago in France focused specifically on packaging Sage, and there are some excellent folks from LogiLab who are making serious progress on the Debian packing. I…
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-science/packages/sage...
The main barrier at the moment, is that sage patches many dependencies. It is better to upstream those patches, not only because it's good engineering practise, but also because it's unlikely that Debian policy (in practise: the admin, infrastructure, and security teams) would allow us to include (e.g.) a duplicate maxima-with-sage-patches in Debian, just to satisfy Sage.
OTOH if you "just want to" create .debs, the task is much easier. But then there's no chance of it entering Debian officially.
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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 dr…
Readers should keep in mind that cython originated from the sage codebase. I bet there's lots of gems in there that many people would like to play with independently of sage. Will you need to release these modules under the GPL?