Trophees Du Libre 2007 Wrap-Up
Martin Albrecht
I guess I should give a little report about the competition. As you might
know, we won the first price in the science category. Giac won the the third
price and Getfem++ scored the second.
The first price includes a price money of 3000 Euros which will be transfered
to the Sage Foundation. We also won a trophy
http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/malb/graphics/trophee_du_libre_2007_-_trophy.jpg
some 'Mandrivia goodies' and a laptop compute from Dell (Core2Duo, 2GB RAM).
Also, we won free hosting via Nexen in a data center in Paris. This price only
includes 7GB of disc space but I talked to the head of that company - Damien
Seguy - after the ceremony (he was also the head juror in the science
category and is a really nice guy btw.) and he told me that we can pretty
much have whatever we need as long as we don't bug them too much. So
basically we indicate our needs, they set it up and we administrate our stuff
ourself: We crash it, we reboot it, period. So at least a second European
mirror seems feasible.
Also, Cetril ( http://www.cetril.org/ ) offered every finalist office space
and some support in Soissons, France free of charge for one year. I think
this is part of their mission to promote free software, but I had trouble
understanding the details (e.g. what kind of support) due to an ambiguous
English translation. If anybody is interested I can contact Cetril though.
It seems the jury was quite impressed by what we can do and they expect great
things from us in the following year :-) Their decision was influenced by the
way the Sage project works: everything is done in the open and William is
giving up control to some extend rather than a private project with code
drops now and then. Also, I was asked several times when we are going to be
in Debian/unstable which seems to be a quality benchmark to a fair amount of
people. I have to admit that I am almost convinced that this is as important
as a Windows port. There might be much more Windows users but Linux users
tend to be more active (bug reports, contributing). Other questions centred
around applied math and the overall vibe was that Octave and Scilab were much
more powerful than numpy and scipy. Frédéric Lehobey (a juror in the science
category) agreed to explain this position on [sage-devel] some time soon.
Besides the 20 minute talk in front of the jury I also had to give a 3 minute
presentation in front of the whole crowd. For this I simply worked through
the demo worksheet. This turned out to be a mistake. The result was that I
was asked afterwards if my *website* would solve calculus homework or if it
was easy to install my website locally. So apparently I left at least some
people under the impression that Sage is a web service.
I also sat down the the main author of Giac for a while and he is going to
write an interface for Giac somewhen in the next couple of months.
Apparently, Trophees du Libre is the biggest free software award around and is
a 'free software' rather than an 'open-source' award. For instance the head
of the Free Software Foundation Europe was the chairman of the jury.
We were also encouraged to attend LinuxTag ( http://www.linuxtag.org/2007/ )
in Germany and the Libre software meeting ( http://2007.rmll.info/?lang=en )
in France and I agree in general that we should attend some more general
open-source meetings. After all, this community has a lot to offer and can
provide many very useful resources, e.g. I talked to the main guy from
http://openusability.org which might be useful at some point.
Btw. we mustn't enter next year.
Cheers,
Martin
--
name: Martin Albrecht
_pgp: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8EF0DC99
_www: http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb
_jab: martinr...@jabber.ccc.de
mabshoff
On Nov 30, 11:19 pm, Martin Albrecht <m...@informatik.uni-bremen.de>
wrote:
>
> I guess I should give a little report about the competition. As you might
> know, we won the first price in the science category. Giac won the the third
> price and Getfem++ scored the second.
>
> The first price includes a price money of 3000 Euros which will be transfered
> to the Sage Foundation. We also won a trophy
>
> some 'Mandrivia goodies' and a laptop compute from Dell (Core2Duo, 2GB RAM).
>
> Also, we won free hosting via Nexen in a data center in Paris. This price only
> includes 7GB of disc space but I talked to the head of that company - Damien
> Seguy - after the ceremony (he was also the head juror in the science
> category and is a really nice guy btw.) and he told me that we can pretty
> much have whatever we need as long as we don't bug them too much. So
> basically we indicate our needs, they set it up and we administrate our stuff
> ourself: We crash it, we reboot it, period. So at least a second European
> mirror seems feasible.
> Also, Cetril (http://www.cetril.org/) offered every finalist office space
> this is part of their mission to promote free software, but I had trouble
> understanding the details (e.g. what kind of support) due to an ambiguous
> English translation. If anybody is interested I can contact Cetril though.
>
> It seems the jury was quite impressed by what we can do and they expect great
> things from us in the following year :-) Their decision was influenced by the
> way the Sage project works: everything is done in the open and William is
> giving up control to some extend rather than a private project with code
> drops now and then. Also, I was asked several times when we are going to be
> in Debian/unstable which seems to be a quality benchmark to a fair amount of
> people. I have to admit that I am almost convinced that this is as important
> as a Windows port. There might be much more Windows users but Linux users
> tend to be more active (bug reports, contributing).
that growing too quickly can be dangerous, too. And I tend to agree
with you that the Windows user base will be on average less
technically capable than the Linux one. But on the other hand the
n00bs tend to expose bugs that an experienced user or developer avoids
because he/she knows better. So in the end we can only win ;)
Being part of Debian will a good thing and much more feasible in the
short term. Both issues are somewhat orthogonal from the stand point
of personal. Hopefully we will get some more active support from the
Debian people, ondrej certainly seems to be the right person to manage
all the Debian issues. We have a google group debian-sage where we are
currently discussing packaging and general issues in that regard.
Please join if you are interested and want to help out.
> Other questions centred
> around applied math and the overall vibe was that Octave and Scilab were much
> more powerful than numpy and scipy. Frédéric Lehobey (a juror in the science
> category) agreed to explain this position on [sage-devel] some time soon.
>
> Besides the 20 minute talk in front of the jury I also had to give a 3 minute
> presentation in front of the whole crowd. For this I simply worked through
> the demo worksheet. This turned out to be a mistake. The result was that I
> was asked afterwards if my *website* would solve calculus homework or if it
> was easy to install my website locally. So apparently I left at least some
> people under the impression that Sage is a web service.
>
> I also sat down the the main author of Giac for a while and he is going to
> write an interface for Giac somewhen in the next couple of months.
> Apparently, Trophees du Libre is the biggest free software award around and is
> a 'free software' rather than an 'open-source' award. For instance the head
> of the Free Software Foundation Europe was the chairman of the jury.
>
> We were also encouraged to attend LinuxTag (http://www.linuxtag.org/2007/)
> in Germany and the Libre software meeting (http://2007.rmll.info/?lang=en)
> in France and I agree in general that we should attend some more general
> open-source meetings. After all, this community has a lot to offer and can
Sounds like an excellent idea.
> Btw. we mustn't enter next year.
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
Michael
> --
> name: Martin Albrecht
> _pgp:http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8EF0DC99
> _www:http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb
mhampton
On Nov 30, 4:19 pm, Martin Albrecht <m...@informatik.uni-bremen.de>
wrote:
>
> I guess I should give a little report about the competition. As you might
> know, we won the first price in the science category. Giac won the the third
> price and Getfem++ scored the second.
>
> The first price includes a price money of 3000 Euros which will be transfered
> to the Sage Foundation. We also won a trophy
>
> some 'Mandrivia goodies' and a laptop compute from Dell (Core2Duo, 2GB RAM).
>
> Also, we won free hosting via Nexen in a data center in Paris. This price only
> includes 7GB of disc space but I talked to the head of that company - Damien
> Seguy - after the ceremony (he was also the head juror in the science
> category and is a really nice guy btw.) and he told me that we can pretty
> much have whatever we need as long as we don't bug them too much. So
> basically we indicate our needs, they set it up and we administrate our stuff
> ourself: We crash it, we reboot it, period. So at least a second European
> mirror seems feasible.
>
> Btw. we mustn't enter next year.
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
> --
> name: Martin Albrecht
> _pgp:http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8EF0DC99
> _www:http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb
Robert Bradshaw
BTW, I think the photo of the trophy is backwards (it's "copyleft"
not copyright).
Ondrej Certik
I think that the native Windows port is very important, many
scientists use windows, especially those not that much computer
oriented.
As to the Debian - I have a very strict opinion on this - I think if
some program (project) cannot enter Debian unstable, for whatever
reasons,
something is wrong with that project. But SAGE will get there, eventually. :)
The windows port is imho a priority.
Ondrej