The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

My counter argument is that we want to expand Sage's user base beyond a small core of researchers, and improve its usability as a Mathematica replacement for students and some scientists who are less interested in things like bleeding edge combinatorics research (they might be but not necessarily the majority). As a Mathematica replacement Sage isn't there yet, but it's good to get a head start on making easier to package and install, as part of that effort. Like for me, if it can solve some differential equations for me and do some integrals I don't care if the version I got through apt is a couple years old.

As for the upstream issues part of the problem there is that some of the upstream dependencies of Sage refuse to accept patches needed for them to integrate with Sage. That's a long story. I think the best approach there, which has already been tried in past approaches to patching for Debian, is to maintain Sage-specific forks of that software that include the necessary patches (IMO they should also be swappable with the originals via update-alternatives if possible). As far as I know there's nothingf legally preventing that, but more the effort involved in maintaining a fork and a package for that fork.

In the long term, I think, it would make sense to completely replace and rewrite some of the code that these external dependencies are used for. But in many cases there's an enormous amount of work involved, and that would only be possible with significant funding. And quite possibly not worth the effort compared to other ways that effort could be spent.

I really applaud William's effort to build a company. I wish him all the best and will be willing to provide what help I can.

I wrote an AMS diatribe http://www.ams.org/notices/201202/rtx120200320p.pdf about publishing computational mathematics, making several points, one of which was that

"Algorithm implementations are proprietary. This needs to end. Science is not done behind a curtain. At least, it has not been hidden since Tar- taglia and Cardano fought over solving the cubic."

However, even if the Ma* software were suddenly open sourced it would be obvious that there was a huge problem.

Mathematics rests on several pillars which are currently absent in computational mathematics.

Mathematics rests on proofs. Where are the proofs for computational mathematical software?

Mathematics rests on research papers, books, and references. Where are the explanations of the theory behind the code? Where are the explanations of the design choices, such as which version of an equation was used and why? Computational mathematics needs much more than bare code.

Mathematics rests on courses and students. There may be one course but a whole focused curriculum on computational mathematics needs to exist.

Mathematics rests on funding. Universities, government, and some government organizations, like Oak Ridge, are the primary support.

William and I have had several discussions around our common problem of finding funding. I was the lead on Magnus (Infinite Group Theory) at City College of New York. We struggled for funding all the time. Axiom can't be funded because there is no organization to handle receipts. Funding agency like accountants.

Indeed, accounting is vital to open source funding. I contacted several large organizations asking them to set up an "open source accounting firm" (OSAF) which would accept and administer the grants to open source projects. OSAF would accept the grant, maintain the account, disburse funds for valid receipts, and maintain financial records for inspection. Such an accounting organization is needed if an open source project is going to get government or company funding.

If SageMath could handle the OSAF issue then the various contributing projects used by Sage could apply for grants from companies or government, knowing that there is an organization capable of managing the funds. This has the non-trivial side benefit of making SageMath the primary focus.

Oh, and SageMath could take the "overhead" (more than 50% at most schools) for "paperwork". My provost lived rather well on the grants.