41–50 of 202 posts
William and I both presented at a RethinkDB meetup this last fall (SageMathCloud leverages RethinkDB changefeeds in awesome ways) and I got to talk to him a bit about some of these frustrations. It really is a rough spot to be in and I wish him all the best.
Does make sense - academia is about theory, businesses are part of implementing end user solutions. most of academia runs on a tech stack delivered by commercial entities anyway. Building products is not as much about creativity as delivering a fixed product with a service plan and support chain in addition to product development. Companies have various operations to create full fledged products - academia can supply…
For other people confused about the meaning of BP in this context, it means Benjamin Pierce Fellow. It appears this talk was given in the context of the Benjamin Pierce Centennial Conference: http://www.math.harvard.edu/conferences/bp/
Yes, exactly. And I haven't given the talk yet! I'm giving it 2 hours from right now, and I'm pretty nervous.
Wait, so will Sage still be open source?
For other people confused about the meaning of BP in this context, it means Benjamin Pierce Fellow. It appears this talk was given in the context of the Benjamin Pierce Centennial Conference: http://www.math.harvard.edu/conferences/bp/
Yes, exactly. And I haven't given the talk yet! I'm giving it 2 hours from right now, and I'm pretty nervous.
May you have fair winds and following seas.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As Stein explains in the slides: because he couldn't sustainably pay people to work with him on SAGE, and there is only so much you can do alone.
But you can be a professor and also start a company simultaneously
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you can't be a professor and work full-time on another project, which is what he wants to do.
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.
Wait, so will Sage still be open source?
Absolutely YES. Sage is and will always be 100% open source. To ensure this, the GPL copyright is spread amongst over 500 people. Also, the software written by the company SageMath, Inc. is also completely open source ( https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc ).
What will be the source of revenue? Dual-license? Support?
Setting up a company can help because it will let other researchers support the project by buying the software on research grants. A grant can also pay for consultant-style improvements to software. It doesn't really matter if the software is also being given away for free. The important thing is to have an invoice to give to the university financial services staff. I'd prefer it if the granting agencies supported th…
"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).
Anyway, my point is that even if you're in a niche, if you are the clear expert in that niche (say if you created the framework, or in your case, the software), then a book may be one worthwhile component of a monetization strategy. If you can sell a $30 book to 4000 people, you can earn some decent money. (The royalties on a $30 book on Leanpub are $26.50, so multiplying by 4000 results in over $100K.)