SageMathCloud now open source

[William Stein]

Hi,

SageMathCloud is now completely open source. The complete source
code is here, so if you've ever wondered how something in SMC works,
you can now find out...

https://github.com/sagemath/cloud

There is also a new developer mailing list:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/sage-cloud-devel


Question: Why is SMC open source?

Answer: Two of the four NSF grants that very substantially supported
SMC development had explicit open source requirements.


-- William


--
William Stein
Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org

[Jan Groenewald]

Congratulations. Lifechanging news, we will come to realise.

Regards,
Jan

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[William Stein]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 11:21 AM, Christopher Swenson
<ch...@caswenson.com> wrote:
> Awesome! I look forward to poking around.

It won't be easy, since most of the time I've been the only developer
(100% of the time for the backend stuff), so please don't hesitate to
ask questions, since this will help in moving things toward being
documented.

I'll likely fund a west-coast Sage Days workshop soon-ish on "Open
Source SageMathCloud", which could involve a lot of talks/walk
throughs, etc., of the source code. Interested?

-- William

>
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 11:02 AM, kcrisman <kcri...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> SageMathCloud is now completely open source. The complete source
>>> code is here, so if you've ever wondered how something in SMC works,
>>> you can now find out...
>>>
>>> https://github.com/sagemath/cloud
>>>
>>> There is also a new developer mailing list:
>>>
>>> https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/sage-cloud-devel
>>>
>>

>> Awesome! Does that include the back-end stuff that was originally closed?
>> Just curious.

>>
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[Christopher Swenson]

I would definitely be interested in another SMC Sage Days (or SMC days).

[Rob Beezer]

Yahoo!

[William Stein]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 11:33 AM, Christopher Swenson
<ch...@caswenson.com> wrote:
> I would definitely be interested in another SMC Sage Days (or SMC days).

Tentative plan:

Sage Days n on the Open Sourced SageMathCloud - in Seattle Feb 2-7, 2015.

Write to me (wst...@uw.edu) if you're interested in attending. As
usual, there is a certain amount of funding available.

[Heikki Arponen]

Great move!

[William Stein]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 1:28 PM, maldun <dom...@gmx.net> wrote:
> That's great to hear!
>
> Although I don't know If GPL3 is the best choice ...

I actually didn't have an option regarding GPL or not.

> Are there already alternative plans to make funding from SMC, since closed
> Source is not an option anymore?
> (I think this topic is important, since resources are a major issue)

I don't know yet, but I still hope it will be possible to start a
company around hosting of SMC, even with SMC being open source. It
likely will provide less revenue, and be more difficult to get
investment. However, I'm optimistic that at least _something_ will be
possible, which in the longterm will have the intended impact
(supporting core Sage development).

William

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[Viviane Pons]

2014-12-11 22:46 GMT+01:00 William Stein <wst...@gmail.com>:

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 1:28 PM, maldun <dom...@gmx.net> wrote:
> That's great to hear!
>
> Although I don't know If GPL3 is the best choice ...

I actually didn't have an option regarding GPL or not.

> Are there already alternative plans to make funding from SMC, since closed
> Source is not an option anymore?
> (I think this topic is important, since resources are a major issue)

I don't know yet, but I still hope  it will be possible to start a
company around hosting of SMC, even with SMC being open source.    It
likely will provide less revenue, and be more difficult to get
investment.  However, I'm optimistic that at least _something_ will be
possible, which in the longterm will have the intended impact
(supporting core Sage development).

I do believe so. And also, I'm pretty sure that SMC being open will gather even more people to Sage (it was already doing it while it was close) and this way bring more potential developers and a bigger interest of the math community.

I find it a VERY good news! And I must say, it is at the exact right time for us on our own European grant proposal. If we get the grant, I hope we can get some developers to work on it!

Best,

Viviane

 

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[Dima Pasechnik]

On 2014-12-11, Rob Beezer <bee...@ups.edu> wrote:
> Yahoo!

what, funding from Yahoo, too?
:)

[William Stein]

On Dec 11, 2014 11:23 PM, "Dr. David Kirkby (Kirkby Microwave Ltd)" <drki...@kirkbymicrowave.co.uk> wrote:

>
> On 11 Dec 2014 17:46, "William Stein" <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > SageMathCloud is now completely open source.   
>

> Great.

>
> > Question: Why is SMC open source?
> >
> > Answer: Two of the four NSF grants that very substantially supported
> > SMC development had explicit open source requirements.
> >
> >
> >  -- William
>

> So why was the source not opened earlier?  Was this requirement buried in the small print and you only just noticed it?
>

Yes, exactly.

> I recall the discussions on here a few months back where you defended the decision to keep it closed source. That seems strange thing to do if you knew that two of the grants supporting the work had these open source requirements.
>

I didn't know.

> Dave.

[William Stein]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 11:40 AM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 11:33 AM, Christopher Swenson
> <ch...@caswenson.com> wrote:
>> I would definitely be interested in another SMC Sage Days (or SMC days).
>
> Tentative plan:
>
> Sage Days n on the Open Sourced SageMathCloud - in Seattle Feb 2-7, 2015.
>
> Write to me (wst...@uw.edu) if you're interested in attending. As
> usual, there is a certain amount of funding available.

One annoying thing is that I can't directly support non-US people
using that funding, which is really annoying. Of course, everybody
is welcome.

[William Stein]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 10:28 AM, maldun <dom...@gmx.net> wrote:
> Hi!

>
> On Thursday, December 11, 2014 10:47:20 PM UTC+1, William wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 1:28 PM, maldun <dom...@gmx.net> wrote:
>> > That's great to hear!
>> >
>> > Although I don't know If GPL3 is the best choice ...
>>
>> I actually didn't have an option regarding GPL or not.
>>

> Not even LGPL or at least GPL2?

I may have an option regarding GPL2 versus GPL3.

>>
> Just some ideas that would come to my mind:
>
> The software is open, but hosting doesn't have to be
>
> Premium accounts with extras
> More available processing power for money
> One idea could be mimiing Github: All worksheets are open, except you pay
> some bucks/month
> Goodies (e.g. alternative skins for the interface)
>
> Apps for smartphones: The flashcard app Anki does this. Although it is OS
> they charge money for smartphone interfaces
> GPL does not forbid adding commercial extra packages, as long they are
> standalone enough.
> The classic: Advertisment

Thanks for all of your ideas!

William

>
> - Stefan

[William Stein]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 12:19 PM, mmarco <mma...@unizar.es> wrote:
> My impression is that open sourcing SMC wouldn't have a big impact on the
> business oportunity.
>
> The main niche of clients would be universities that want to move their math
> courses to the cloud. For them, having the source code mean that it would be
> possible to set up their own server, but they still would need to buy
> hardware, set it up and maintain it, and hire personel with the expertise to
> administer it. That is a big investment just to start, i guess that you
> (having already the expertise and some hardware to start with) could offer
> prices that beat that option, specially in the short term.

It's not so simple. When SMC was closed source, UW would do the work
involving taking payments, legal stuff, and allow me to use the
hardware/people/resource that UW has. Since SMC is now open source,
they won't allow any of that in a business context. (This was part
of the reason SMC was closed source.) This means that
commercialization of SMC can't happen until several relatively
expensive things along the lines of "they still would need to buy
hardware, set it up and maintain it, and hire personnel with the
expertise to administer it" happen, which must get paid for by private
money. The expenses are way more than an order of magnitude more than
I personally have available. Exactly what prevents the competitor
you are imagining is also an obstruction to commercialization of SMC
now. It's even a little scarier right now, because much of SMC is
running on Google Compute Engine, and those free credits are rapidly
running out (commercialization was going to take care of that). There
is enough hardware at UW to keep things running, though I also pay
over $7K/year just for physical rack space for hosting that hardware
at UW.

But don't worry -- there is a potential private investor, and I think
things will work out very well.

> The possible risk is that somebody could start a company to offer the same
> service, but again you have the starting advantage.
>
> About this... what about AGPL? Would that be possible?

I can't make any license changes in the shortterm, though eventually
it may be possible. AGPL would mean that if somebody else makes an
SMC competitor they would have to share any modifications they make to
the backend code. That would be reassuring.

-- William

[Ondřej Čertík]

There is at least one company (https://about.gitlab.com/) that run web
service completely using open source (MIT licensed) code:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master

I don't know how much they earn though, but this suggest they have at
least 6 full time employees:

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/06/04/github-rival-gitlab-building-business-just-0-1-paying-customers/

Ondrej

[William Stein]

Thanks for the link and example, That article also says:

"We're starting to break even about now," says the CEO.

which might be encouraging (or discouraging) depending on how you look
at it, so maybe they make over 500K/year in revenue (though they are
in Ukrain so who knows how much their business costs to break even).

For comparison, github (which is closed source) was valued at almost 1
billion dollars in 2012 [1]...

William

[1] http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2012-07-09-github-takes-100m-in-largest-investment-by-andreessen-horowitz/

>
> Ondrej

[Christopher Swenson]

I'm usually pretty against AGPL, though it may make a little bit of sense here. I often see companies "open source" their code under AGPL, which basically allows them to call themselves open source, but still able to sell commercial licenses, as few other companies will want to touch AGPL code.

(I personally lean on the MIT side of the spectrum.)

[Mesut Karakoç]

Hi William,

Why do not add a donation link to sign/up page?

Have you ever considered Wikipedia like business plan?

Sagecloud is a precious opportunity for research and teaching, it would be sad to loosing it. I am happy to hear it is open source now, but we should able to keep it alive.

Mesut

On Thursday, December 11, 2014 7:47:04 PM UTC+2, William Stein wrote: