Bye

[Nathann Cohen]

Hello everybody,

I am disgusted by what this community has become. You are also tired
of seeing me complain here about a lot of things.

Have fun.

Nathann

[Martin Vahi]

All the drama and the king's men...

.. can not help me, because wherever I travel, my personal properties and dreams and beliefs come with me.

Actually, I feel sorry for Your mental pains, but as little as I have seen from this forum within the last few weeks, I do not see anyone doing any harm to You. What I see is the pain that You seem to have put a lot of Your hard work to the Sage project and feel that the situation, where You have to struggle to make Your ends meet is unjust due to the fact that someone else is able to be financially better off than You by using the work that You have contributed to a project that has a lot of contributers.

I'm not part of this community, yet, may be never, but from my perspective You are welcome "back" any time. I suggest that You create Your own web-site, where You offer Your Sage related consultancy services. Do not expect anyone to find it, a home page is not an advertisement, but an anti-advertisement, if it is bad or missing, and a supporting channel for contacts that You make by other means, but it does help, specially if it is not some crap with furry animals and no target audience related content. You should also try to figure out, who Your clients will be, because clients are the people, who will form the world of all freelancers and every self respecting person should care about the world that he/she lives in. You probably do not want to serve murderous drug lords. I suggest that You also skip the psychopaths that usually pose as "CEO-s"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4ou9rOssPg

If you look carefully, then without any jokes You might find scientific papers from the social sciences side that pose the research question as: "Do economics students pose more anticooperative behaviour than the rest?"

https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/12/29/are-economics-majors-anti-social/
(archival copy: https://archive.is/2OwFs )

So, that's one reason, why it makes perfect, smart, sense for smart people to avoid having anything to do with CEO-types. My own take on it is that if they were not white-collar-psychopaths, then they would be beating and stabbing people, so them being white-collar psychopaths in stead of the violent crooks is a very beneficial solution for everyone. That, of course, does not mean that I should bare them, so I try to look for smarter clients, preferably small entrepreneurs, who do specialist work themselves and want to earn more by running their own business. I guess that there are exceptions, of course, but as the saying about rules of human nature goes: an exception confirms the rule.

Thank You for reading this comment and I hope that it helps. :-)

[kcrisman]

I'm not part of this community, yet, may be never, but from my perspective You are welcome "back" any time.

+1

Though in open source development (at least in open development projects like this one) meaning that sometimes people will hit the road over disagreements, everyone should definitely thank Nathann for loads and loads of work, especially in graphs and combinatorial objects:

$ ./sage --version

SageMath Version 7.1.beta3, Release Date: 2016-02-11

$ git log --author="Nathann Cohen" --pretty=oneline | wc -l

    1736

I for one hope this is just a temporary hiatus.

To elaborate, while it's true that there are a few axes of division that can and do crop up:

* GPL/BSD/other license arguments

* Disagreements in whether things are a bug or not

* Relative use of forums for Sage-the-library versus Sage-the-distribution versus SMC-the-code versus SMC-the-paid-service

* Who gets to decide on user interface

and lots of others, I hope that despite all these (very real and not trivial) differences we can still feel like working on Sage is, overall, a joy and not a burden.  When it becomes a burden - and I think it has probably been so at times for most long-term developers - taking a break before returning when the time is right is the right thing to do.  Even the BDFL has done this when the referee process became too onerous, if I recall correctly (not counting the current focus on the other project).  So don't forget about breaks!  

[David Roe]

Though we have had disagreements, I also value all of the work you've done for Sage and would welcome you back if you decide you want to get involved again.  Thanks for all of the time and energy you've put into making Sage better.

David

[Bill Hart]

Nathann,

Point taken, loud and clear. But consider boycotting the forum for a while under protest and returning after a break.

Why sacrifice the things that you enjoy, just to make a point to others. I'm pretty sure there are lots of people that value your contributions in this community greatly. Disagree with people, by all means. But don't take their disagreeing back as a sign of anything personal against you. Those of us who have disagreed with you on this or that probably disagree with far too much anyway.

Bill.

[Nicolas M. Thiery]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 06:28:46PM -0800, kcrisman wrote:
> ...Though in open source development (at least in open development

> projects like this one) meaning that sometimes people will hit the road
> over disagreements, everyone should definitely thank Nathann for loads
> and loads of work, especially in graphs and combinatorial objects:

> ...

> So don't forget about breaks!

Nicely phrased Karl. +1 all along.

Cheers,
Nicolas
--
Nicolas M. Thiéry "Isil" <nth...@users.sf.net>
http://Nicolas.Thiery.name/

[Jason Grout]

Definitely +1. Thanks for all your work, Nathann.

Jason

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[Nathann Cohen]

Hello again,

I read your comments and answered some of them. Let's make it simple:

- William, who works at making people confuse Sage with his product
SageMathCloud (making promotional videos ...)
- Nicolas and his team, who I haven't actually working on trac for a
while but build their career on other people's work through Sage
- The fact that almost all of you accepts this as normal

Those are the reason that I leave (if that needed be explained).

When then I read comments saying "we value your work, come back
whenever you want" what I head is in total agreement with what I said
above. "What we need is free worker, we don't care if they complain
for as long as they work. We won't pay attention to what they say
either, all that matter is that they keep on working".

I worked here for the science, and the pleasure. The pleasure I can
find elsewhere, and the science is something that everybody forgot.
What you do nowadays is sell a product. And you write it for free for
people who sell it.

Nathann

[Dima Pasechnik]

On Wednesday, February 24, 2016 at 7:49:58 AM UTC, Nathann Cohen wrote:

Hello again,

I read your comments and answered some of them. Let's make it simple:

- William, who works at making people confuse Sage with his product
SageMathCloud (making promotional videos ...)
- Nicolas and his team, who I haven't actually working on trac for a
while but build their career on other people's work through Sage
- The fact that almost all of you accepts this as normal 

Nathann, 

the fact that you made a very successful sale to CNRS of a nicely wrapped

in Sage patches product, called "Nathann Cohen, PhD", to a tune of few million euro,

(paid is small instalments called "salary")

looks perfectly OK for you, as this is money going into your bank account, right?

Maybe you should at last take a hard look at yourself, to begin with?

Your seemingly irresistible urges to escalate any slightest displeasure

to the point of no return look positively scary to me.

Dima

[Nathann Cohen]

the fact that you made a very successful sale to CNRS of a nicely wrapped

in Sage patches product, called "Nathann Cohen, PhD", to a tune of few million euro,

(paid is small instalments called "salary")

looks perfectly OK for you, as this is money going into your bank account, right?

Dima,

The CNRS hired me (4years ago?) as a researcher in Graph Theory. They looked at my publications, coauthors and recommendation letters. They heard about my past research and what I planned to do in the future. They pay me monthly for my work as a researcher in graph theory. Which I do.

You should think of adding a disclaimer saying "I am paid by Nicolas' grant" in your messages. 

Nathann

[Dima Pasechnik]

On Wednesday, February 24, 2016 at 9:43:04 AM UTC, Nathann Cohen wrote:

the fact that you made a very successful sale to CNRS of a nicely wrapped

in Sage patches product, called "Nathann Cohen, PhD", to a tune of few million euro,

(paid is small instalments called "salary")

looks perfectly OK for you, as this is money going into your bank account, right?

Dima,

The CNRS hired me (4years ago?) as a researcher in Graph Theory. They looked at my publications, coauthors and recommendation letters. They heard about my past research and what I planned to do in the future. They pay me monthly for my work as a researcher in graph theory. Which I do.

We will perhaps never know for sure whether the fact that you did mention your work on Sage in your application was decisive in your hiring. 

However, to me and everybody else, except perhaps you, it is plain obvious that this may be construed as you having used Sage name for your monetary gains.

 

You should think of adding a disclaimer saying "I am paid by Nicolas' grant" in your messages. 

 

It is of course very kind of you to remind me that I am less fortunate than you and don't have a permanent job, thanks. You seem to need 

these sorts of self-esteem boosts...

And no, Nicolas is not my employer, by any means. It is true that I am paid in part by a grant from which  he is paid, too. This is all to it.

Anyhow, I am only writing this because I am worried about you, as you seem to be delusional lately. 

Next you will go after people who publish books citing your graph theory results and accuse them of profiting from your "free" work. 

And then you will go after all people publishing books on graph theory in general, cause you contribute to graph theory

and they take a profit from it. 

Nathann

[kcrisman]

Regarding the most recent conversation turn... again, as if it needed to be said, this is great material for sage-flame.

[kcrisman]

As to the substance of Nathann's comments, most of this is really an argument about the GPL, or rather about how many of the potentialities in the GPL are acceptable to a given community around a GPL product.  If you prefer not to contribute to GPL software, that is your right.  But GPL software can be commercialized as a service or support, and of course anyone can apply for grants.  So to avoid the possibility, do not contribute to GPL (or many other licenses) of software.  CC-BY-NC would be a good place to look in that case, I guess?

I personally don't feel like my own (puny) contributions and the benefit I and my students get from Sage are mutually exclusive with the idea that others might also get benefit (monetarily or not) from Sage.  Because any contributions are still GPL (that is also true of SMC) and hence I may still benefit from them.  However, I - and many others here - understand completely if that licensing regime in the end seems inappropriate to any given contributor.

For any who geek out about such things, I highly recommend reading about "anti-rival goods".

The charge "who works at making people confuse Sage with his product" may have some substance, though one should point out again that SMC is GPL and could in principle be offered either at cost or free by any enterprising person or persons.  Perhaps it would be worth a - separate - discussion thread on how much or little overlap between SMC and SageMath "advertising" is appropriate.  Though I doubt it would be particularly conclusive; I assume there are a wide variety of opinions on this, and thus far it seems that most SMC-skeptics are willing to tolerate this for the increased visibility to Sage, regardless of whether SMC funds eventually are big enough to become available for Sage development (but let's hope!).

[Jori Mäntysalo]

On Wed, 24 Feb 2016, kcrisman wrote:

> As to the substance of Nathann's comments, most of this is really an
> argument about the GPL, or rather about how many of the potentialities
> in the GPL are acceptable to a given community around a GPL product.

Nathann is not only one thinking this. But at least Brendan McKay has gone
to opposite direction, as some might remember: "- - Due to the legal
nonsense that large package distributors need to worry about, it has
proved too much trouble to maintain an idiosyncratic licence. I didn't
change my opinion about military use, but - -".

* * *

About the naming issue: Is it possible to open a company called
"SageComp", "SageCalc" or something similar? I meant that the **name**
'Sage' is not a real private property of Stein. Or would not be according
to laws of Finland, but I don't know about other countries.

--
Jori Mäntysalo

[Nathann Cohen]

Hello Karl-Dieter,

> As to the substance of Nathann's comments, most of this is really an argument
> about the GPL, or rather about how many of the potentialities in the GPL are
> acceptable to a given community around a GPL product

This interpretation of my comments, if this is what you proposed, could not be
further from the truth. My problem is not legal.

After exchanging several emails with Bill Hart about all this, I was laughing in
my bed yesterday at 2am. You will see, it's hilarious:

1) Bill gave me his picture of Sage's life. He knows William, and told me what
   he knows of how Sage was started. He told me of the people who were around at
   that time, their life and how hard they found it to get funding to work on
   open-source software. Basically, he gave me a picture of William's attempts
   since then to make Sage known, through getting funding there and there,
   through academia through rich guys, through other grants, through SMC.

2) I told him what I knew of William: I never met the guy, and though I started
   working on Sage ~6 years ago my picture of sage is pretty much William-free,
   short of knowing that he started it. I don't remember [1] him entering the
   technical discussions of Sage or taking side for this or that design
   choice. I don't remember working with him on any code, I don't remember him
   saying "I'll fix this" and "fixing this" later. Hear me well: since I worked
   in Sage, I always considered William as a historial figure [2]. There is
   nothing wrong with him starting the project and moving to other things later
   of course, he just wasn't in Sage's landscape anymore.

And that's where the two visions clash. For Bill Hart, Sage's story is the story
of what William Stein does to make Sage successful. For me, Sage is an
open-source software managed collaboralively by a community of volunteers.

In Bill's story, however, William's work on Sage never ended. It's like he has
been trying all he could from the start, and still does. And on the way, made
'choices he had to make' like trademarking Sage's name, becoming the CEO of
SageMath Inc., like creating SMC, like trying the two together in name and
purposes and even in the ads because to him [3] that's one and the same attempt
to make Sage successful. All choices that you saw me complain about on this
forum.

That's where it becomes hilarious: I would never dream of doing anything like
that without consulting everybody on sage-devel at every step. To me, sage-devel
is how and where Sage is being 'managed', and led, and headed. On the other
hand, I never thought that William could have any specific claim on the topic,
since to me he had simply never existed on the radars since as long as I have
been here. At most, given what he did, he would have been listened twice as much
as anybody else, but that's it.

In the picture I understood from Bill, however, it's as if William never thought
that the people on sage-devel who maintain and develop this software could have
any specific claim on the topic, since Sage is a software he created and has
been trying to push ever since. Thus, no need to ask for their opinion and act
on any disagreement when it comes to create a for-profit company, to become a
CEO of a company with this name, of managing SMC and making money with it [4].

So, yeah. That's why I was laughing in my bed at 2am. To me it's like a 6 years
misunderstanding. And of course it's not about licenses. I never imagined
somebody could think that the collective and free efforts of dozens of persons
across years were but a detail in a bigger picture, and could be as easily
ignored when it came to decide of how Sage was to be developed. In this picture,
none of this work even exists.

Nathann

[1] Please guys, don't try to find a lost sage-devel thread from years ago. I
    said that I don't *remember* it, and that's all. I'm trying to convey a
    general idea.

[2] Which does not diminish his past work, of course. Just means it's something
    from a past era.

[3] Yeah, I'm sorry but I am reduced to interpreting omens since this
    conversation about him does not apparently deserve his intervention.

[4] To give you an idea: I wouldn't have seen anything wrong if William had come
    here to ask everybody to contribute *money* to start SMC as a group. I'm
    don't know if I would have participated (no clue), but that would have
    sounded like a natural step to me.

[Bill Hart]

Nathan, I'm glad you posted this so others can see your perspective on things. It will no doubt be eye opening for some people who just don't understand where you are coming from.

But as I said, it is your opinion that William is coming in and making decisions that affect Sage without consulting the democratic community that he started, not mine. I don't see William that way at all. I see him as he describes himself in his recent blog post, which I pointed out to you. He cares about all the developers giving their time without proper academic recognition, especially in the form of permanent jobs and academic credit. Academics fundamentally don't value maths software or its developers appropriately.

I still don't get why you think you should have a right to eat, but other people should not. It seems to me that it is you who want other people to work for you for free! If that is not how it is, then let's hear your strategy for fixing the problem? And please, let's not hear about this or that professor living a cushy life who hasn't done this or that for you. When you finally live the life of a professor and see the ridiculous demands on their time, you will understand just how impossible it is for them to find time to do work for you.

You got your recognition for working on Sage, which I pointed out to you. And you got a permanent job. And that is where your expectations should stop. Come back in 10 or 20 years and complain if you didn't get promoted to professor because you were 'only' writing software.

Bill.

[Harald Schilly]

On Thursday, February 25, 2016 at 4:25:41 AM UTC+1, kcrisman wrote:

CC-BY-NC would be a good place to look in that case, I guess?

This is off-topic, but I just want to point out that an NC license (and similar ones) are quite restrictive, maybe more than you would think. You cannot use the content on wikipedia (through wikimedia commons), your software cannot be included in debian, you cannot mix NC work with any other existing non-NC work, it cannot be used for "open access" scientific publications,  etc.

http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC

-- h

 

[David Joyner]

My (admittedly vague) memory is different.

IIRC, the idea of a Sage company, with profits going back into Sage,
goes back farther than 6 years. (That would make it 2010 but Sage was
started in 2004-2005.) The question was not if but what it would sell.
I think it was always thought it would sell a service (e.g., expertise
at modeling a problem using Sage). I also think that this was
discussed with the community and basically everyone was supportive. I
don't remember a specific email to sage-devel about it but I think
these conversations occurred in the early Sage Days. I for one lack
both expertise and interest in dealing with a Sage company, as I
suspect most other developers do as well. So why ask for business
advice from people who have no expertise?

Until SMC came around there really wasn't a service to sell. If the
world ran on linux boxes, or if Sage ran on windows, the Sage company
probably would not exist. However, as it is, it sells reliable
web-server access to teachers and researchers (I'm guessing mostly
teachers, but that's only because I think most researchers can
configure linux box for what they need).

An affordable service provided to teachers is a good thing, IMHO. In
fact, I think the Sage company should partner with these companies
that sell math Common Core lesson plans for a few bucks each and sell
Sage worksheets for these Common Core lesson plans.

So, Nathann, my guess is that your anger is a misunderstanding of
history. However, It's also possible that there isn't a logical
explanation. It's also possible that I am mis-remembering things.

[kcrisman]

CC-BY-NC would be a good place to look in that case, I guess?

This is off-topic, but I just want to point out that an NC license (and similar ones) are quite restrictive, maybe more than you would think. You cannot use the content on wikipedia (through wikimedia commons), your software cannot be included in debian, you cannot mix NC work with any other existing non-NC work, it cannot be used for "open access" scientific publications,  etc.

I didn't say that licenses of that nature were a good idea, I just said that if you wanted to avoid the possibility of others using it for profit, you have to look elsewhere than GPL.

[kcrisman]

> As to the substance of Nathann's comments, most of this is really an
> argument about the GPL, or rather about how many of the potentialities

> in the GPL are acceptable to a given community around a GPL product.

Nathann is not only one thinking this. But at least Brendan McKay has gone
to opposite direction, as some might remember: "- - Due to the legal
nonsense that large package distributors need to worry about, it has
proved too much trouble to maintain an idiosyncratic licence. I didn't
change my opinion about military use, but - -".

Actually, that was exactly the example I was going to use, but figured my post was already long enough :)  I hope I wasn't claiming that only Nathann was thinking about this; I usually assume a *very* wide range of opinion, as I stated.  But the squeaky wheel is the one you respond to.

> As to the substance of Nathann's comments, most of this is really an argument
> about the GPL, or rather about how many of the potentialities in the GPL are
> acceptable to a given community around a GPL product

This interpretation of my comments, if this is what you proposed, could not be
further from the truth. My problem is not legal.

Oh, I was fully aware of that!  We've discussed it offline before.  However, note my clarification, "rather about how many of the potentialities in the GPL are acceptable to a given community around a GPL product".  And that is *precisely* what your objection is - that you would rather that all decisions regarding e.g. commercialization (implicit in the GPL potential) be done in one way, while they are sometimes done in another way. E.g., you say in a later post, "could be as easily ignored when it came to decide of how Sage was to be developed".  GPL doesn't tell us how to do that, and actually explicitly allows this.   So I'm not saying at all that it's about the legality, but rather what *social* norms are allowable in our particular community that are inherent in GPL (or whatever other license).  For example, contributions to a number of dual-licensed software must be signed over to the organization.  I suppose if Sage had a BSD license maybe it would have been a different discussion, as such communities often have different perspectives on commercialization (or so I gather, that could be an uninformed view).

In that sense, would you prefer to have had (obviously, hypothetically) a different license that forbids such commercialization?  (That's an honest question, I'm not sure how you'd reply.)

You can, and probably will, disagree with this characterization of what's at stake here, but I think it's the underlying issue.  As I've said often in the past, everyone should go and read Steven Weber's "The Success of Open Source", especially the parts about governance.  Nothing is new under the (open-source) sun.

By the way, I agree with Bill and think your other clarification is extremely helpful, because I am sure there are many developers who are in similar shoes as having come in past the point William was as heavily involved in day-to-day things and tickets.  His stated view is that SMC (and other, past projects like psage) is 100% aimed at getting Sage proper in better shape.  One can believe that or not, naturally. 

But it's good for old-timers and new-timers to keep in mind the evolution of the project - and think where it might be another 10 years from now!  I think there is still huge potential and already a lot of success, so let's keep it up.

[Nicolas M. Thiery]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 02:25:20AM -0800, Dima Pasechnik wrote:
> And no, Nicolas is not my employer, by any means. It is true that I am
> paid in part by a grant from which he is paid, too.

Just 2 cents, for the sake of precision: the university Paris Sud is
getting my salary reimbursed for 12 months out of the 48 months of the
duration of the project. A fraction of that is used to buy out 1/4th
of my teaching duties. The rest goes to the university, the lab, and
equipment/travel/workshop money. I am not getting any of it personally.

Best,

[mmarco]

Wow, this whole discussion, and the subsequent thread opened by William have really blown my mind a little bit.

I disagree with most of the objections raised by Nathann. I have to say that the impression I got from them at the beginning have changed as the discussion has evolved and  his points have been clarified. I also dislike his (sometimes aggresive, sometimes disrispectful) style when writing in this group.

But I really respect the fact that he takes a moral position about what he considers to be an ethical problem. And I am really happy that he has raised these questions, and that we have had this discusion. As Rogaway [1] recently stated, it is important that we, scientists, take into consideration the moral implications of our work; so I am literally delighted to see a discussion about the morality of what we do in sage-devel.

At the beginning, I thought that the main problem that Nathan was pointing to had to do with the money. The fact that somebody (he particularizes in William, but also makes some comments about the OpenDreamKit grant) makes money using the Sage code was -or I thought it was- thecore moral problem. I don't agree with that view, for a couple of reasons:

1) All Sage code is GPL'ed, which means not only that everybody has the legal right to use it as apart as a business model (provided the conditions of the GPL are respected); but also that the people that wrote that code have given an explicit permission to do so. The fact that the use of Sage code in SMC is legal is not the consequence of some loophole in the law. It is the consequence of the explicit permission of the code writers to everybody that wants to use the code with basically the only condition of not relicensing it. That clearly includes the kind of use that SMC does, so I definitely see no moral problem there. William can use my code in SMC because I explicitely gave him (and everybody else) permission to use it in that way (and many other possible ways too). Same applyes for the rest of the developpers.

2) If we to to a lower level in the moral discussion, and leaving law aside, we get to the point of the morality of copyright and intellectual property in general: which are the possible ethical uses of other people's immaterial creations? The most extended line of thought (and it is the one in which the copyright laws -and hence the software licenses- are based) is that such a use is ethical as long as it is done with the permission of the author. The author has some kind of natural right to decide who and how can use his/her creations. I disagree with this view (and I know i am probably alone in this). The idea that somebody in the other side of the world cannot make use of a idea just because I had that idea before, and wrote it down sounds ridiculous to me. The idea or property is bounded to the limitation of the objects of that property: we need a criterion to decide who does an apple belong to because it can only be eaten once. In the immaterial world of mind creations, there is not such limitation, so the concept of property really makes no sense: we only accept it because it is what we are used to. Ideas should be freely shared and used. As should software, texts, songs and any other immaterial goods. We, as a society, can decide to put some regulations on this in the basis that they would cause people to behave in a way that we consider to be better for us in the long term; but that is not based on moral anymore: that is based on convenience (which might be a good idea, but it is not a moral mandate). So, from my point of view in this aspect, there wouldn't be any moral problem in the use of Sage code that SMC does either.

At some point, Nathann rephrased his complains, and then I realized that I hadn't correctly understood his  reasons. He claims that the main problem is the fact that the decission of starting SMC was taken without considering the sage developper's community. I think he is partly right about this: it could have been a better idea to try this step as a collegiate effort... or maybe it could have never work, who knows. I don't think William did something wrong (as I said, I don't think he needs anybody's permission to do what he is doing, both from a legal and moral point of view). In fact, I am very grateful to William for taking such a huge personal risk just for trying to make Sage better in the long run. But I can why somebody cannot like this move, and consider it some kind of treason to the Sage developper community.

I am kind of sad to hear that Nathann will leave. I will not try to convince him to come back: he is an adult that seems to have thought carefully about this decission. Besides, I also can understand why he could consider such an attempt as a proof of how developpers here are just treated as free workforce. So I will respect his decission, but still I consider it as an important loss for this community. Not only for all the hard work he has done, but also because I think it is important for us all to hear different points of view. Even if we all disagree with what Nathann says, it is important that someone says it. It is important to force ourselves to at least think about it, and debate.

And yes, I too think that in past discussions Nathann has been too aggressive and that it might have hurt some feelings, which I don't like at all. But still, I think his views are valuable. I just wish he had expressed them in a less acid way.

[1] http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.html

Note: I used the thirthd person when referring to Nathann because this is intended to be a personal reflection directed to everybody in general and not one person in particular.

[Viviane Pons]

Dear all,

I answer this thread only now as I haven't had much time to read sage-devel these past days.

First, I must say that I feel very offended my Nathann public implication  that by being part of ODK I "build my career on other people's work". Nathann, I think you have absolutely no idea what my career is built on, what my work is and what I have done and still do for Sage (not everything is trac tickets).

Second, if you suffer that much doing Sage, then well, just stop doing it. The great thing about working in research (with a permanent position) and open-source is that no one if forcing you to do anything.

Now, many people have said that they will miss your contributions and you take that as a proof that you are being exploited. Well see, I value your work as a developer but I think the way you interact with people is toxic for the community. So if you cannot contribute without being toxic, I would rather have you not contributing (and it won't affect my career!!). This is only my opinion and I don't ask the community to back me up. I would just want to point out that even though Nathann sometimes express valuables opinions, the way he express them has lead many other valuable contributors to stop talking on the mailing list. And because you could also get attacked for contributing to a ticket, I'm pretty sure (even though I have no evidence) that we have lost valuable contributions to Sage because the person willing to do the contribution wouldn't bother arguing with Nathann: I would never dream of touching the graph package a bit even if it lacked a key feature I needed.

So well, Nathann, as much as I appreciate you as a person, I don't believe you're in the right place now to contribute to an open-source community.

Saying this, I wish you the best in whatever you do and I hope we can find ways as a community to avoid toxic behaviors and a better way to deal with such things in a future, which wouldn't end by us loosing many contributors (you + the ones you offended too much).

Best

Viviane

--

[aishen]

I don't know you... But I have come to need SMC : I don't use windows !
I was very reluctant to use it because I don't like to work on internet. But it's such a great application and specially nowadays I can work with vpython and ivisual ! My wish for so many years and no more windaube ! (lol)
Sorry but my joy is great...
I tried to educate many young people (a group we call "disfavorised" in pschylogical term) for about 20 years and when I used electronic and computing ( year 88, in france that's was the very beginning) I saw an opportunity to help efficiently some youngs who liked this kind of things.
Open source is the best creation made by man...
Capitalism is the worse !
Enjoy yourself :)
Henri

[Vincent Delecroix]

Hello,

One point I think Nathann has right and was not discussed further is the
fact that Sage the distribution is tightly linked to Sage the company.
Some examples:
- the "forced" change of names by William from Sage to SageMath when
the company is SageMath Inc.
- websites: sagemath.org for the distribution whereas sagemath.com for
the company
- loud advertising from sagemath.org

I feel great that SageMath Inc exists. And I think that it proposes a
useful service especially concerning collaborative work. But I would
feel better if it was either more collaboratively discussed (e.g. at the
same level that Sage code is discussed). Or more disconnected from Sage
the distribution (e.g. not playing with the *.org vs *.com).

Moreover, the cloud service proposed by SageMath Inc is much more than
just Sage. It would have been natural to choose an other name from the
beginning.

Best,
Vincent

[William Stein]

On Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 7:05 AM, Vincent Delecroix

<20100.d...@gmail.com> wrote:
> One point I think Nathann has right and was not discussed further is the
> fact that Sage the distribution is tightly linked to Sage the company. Some
> examples:
> - the "forced" change of names by William from Sage to SageMath

Let me remind you that the name change was publicly discussed, during
which *you* said "[...] Good idea. The current situation is
confusing."

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/sage-devel/sagemath$20change/sage-devel/UCfXO7BlyEc/r_A8F-inxx0J

> Moreover, the cloud service proposed by SageMath Inc is much
> more than just Sage.

The mission statement of the SageMath project is create a viable free
open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab.

--
William (http://wstein.org)

[Vincent Delecroix]

On 09/03/16 13:08, William Stein wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 7:05 AM, Vincent Delecroix
> <20100.d...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> One point I think Nathann has right and was not discussed further is the
>> fact that Sage the distribution is tightly linked to Sage the company. Some
>> examples:
>> - the "forced" change of names by William from Sage to SageMath
>
> Let me remind you that the name change was publicly discussed, during
> which *you* said "[...] Good idea. The current situation is
> confusing."
>
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/sage-devel/sagemath$20change/sage-devel/UCfXO7BlyEc/r_A8F-inxx0J

And my opinion somehow changed because of events I did not knew at that
time. Note that the "confusion" I had was "Sage the math software"
versus "Sage the financial software".

Let me also remind that your argumentation for the name change was (cf
first message of the thread): "Sage is used too much" (that I still
fully agree with) and not "I want to use the name SageMath for my
company and it would be nice to use the same name for the software".
This is what I wanted to criticized in my message.

I hope this make it clearer.

>> Moreover, the cloud service proposed by SageMath Inc is much
>> more than just Sage.
>
> The mission statement of the SageMath project is create a viable free
> open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab.

Which SageMath? What are the actual implications of a mission statement?
For me it is like a jingle, ie just for marketing.

Vincent

[Viviane Pons]

Note that I wasn't saying anything about Nathann's opinions, and I even said that some of them were valuable. We could / should debate many things, and I think these debates happen (as William pointed out about the name). I was mostly defending myself against a false accusation as I am part, I guess, of "Nicolas and his team".

What I was saying is the way Nathann raises these questions, and gives his opinion in general, is often offending in many ways (it has been towards me multiple times and towards lots of other people) which is bad for the community on the long term because we loose valuable contributions. And if he's not able to do it in an other way, then I prefer him gone even if this means we loose a good developer. If whenever you do "something", either a promotional video or a track ticket or whatever, you take the risk of being accused, attacked, or even insulted, then the conclusion is you do nothing ever again: no risk taken! And some people have started to go this way.

From Nathann's message, I understand he believes many people in Sage work mostly for their personal interests against the community, "exploiting" his own work. I think this is completely false and that he is in no place to make such an accusation. But if it is what he truly believes, then, yes, he should leave and stop this recurrent accusations. And it will be better for us.

Best

Viviane