[ANN] New competitor to Sage (Nathann Cohen)

[Bill Hart]

After speaking at length with Nathann Cohen about his vision of Open Source software development I am hereby announcing a new competitor to Sage. It will be called Egas : Egalite Algebra Software.

The main purpose of the project will be to deal with all the shortcomings of the current Sage development model. Here is what Egas stands for:

* Bug free releases -- no release will ever be made with known bugs

* No payment for authors -- all authors will be required to sign a statement saying they have not been paid for working on Egas. This means that no one will be allowed to so Egas development on their employers time, or be employed to work on Egas

* No non-free tools -- we will not make use of any other Open Source that was developed on employers time

* William free -- no William Stein

* We will pick a license that prevents William from making money from it on SMC or EMC or any other for pay platform

* No one will be allowed to sell Egas or make money from it

* No one will be allowed to use software developed on someone's employer's time, and that includes Sage and all the other currently available maths software (this excludes the documentation for Nathann's graph theory code, which Nathann assures me was developed entirely on his own time)

Developers can sign up here, or on our website, as soon as we develop an OS and web server that makes use of no software developed for pay. Our first job will then be to find a suitable non-commercial license and a repository format that wasn't developed on employer's time.

As this project is clearly going to be very puristic it is clearly going to tap a vast untapped potential and we expect many developers to sign up. Please bear with us as we deal with the sudden rush. According to Nathann, all current developers on sage-devel should be able to sign up immediately because he knows none of them are paid to develop Sage currently. But obviously they will vastly prefer Egas.

Bill.

P.S: Nathannn, it's just a joke man. Have a laugh with me and ignore it. I'm not being serious. To be honest I admire your principles, even if I think they are impractical.

[Bill Hart]

Oh, I almost forgot:

* No professors. We don't like professors, since Nathann doesn't. Everyone will be required to sign a statement saying they won't ever become a professor. Greedy fakes that they all are.

Bill.

Nathann: still joking man, hence sage-flame, not sage-serious.

[rjf]

Hm . Jumped from sage-devel to here.  

Did I anticipate that there would be problems when funding ran out? 

the Macsyma/ Maxima project started as an academic/ gov't (including Dept of Defense, Dept of Energy), some private

grant money, project..eventually leading to a checkered course of maintenance and ownership involving in part Lisp Machine companies.

While not bug free, each new release appears to be downloaded by hundreds of thousands of sites, not counting those who get it indirected via unixish distributions or for that matter, Sage.

So there is an alternative to the Ma's.

I was unhappy with GPL preferring a Berkeley style release  (use it for anything, just don't sue us)

but it seemed to have survived.

The new model popularized at Stanford and Berkeley, and a few other places, is that

if you have a good idea, you get investors and start a company.  with about a 10%

chance your company doesn't fail.  You can possibly get cheated by the business

investors, or you might get rich.  You can take your money and give it to medical

research to cure malaria, or you can give it to starving mathematicians. (you should

know the foundations --)

Insisting that programmers not get paid so they can support their families by

delivering pizza is so, last century.

Personally, I think there are enormous potential problems with the entrepreneurship

model, including (for academics) serious conflict-of-interest issues.  But if the

nouveau riche want to subsidize math, there you are.

RJF

[Tom Boothby]

Bill,

Undergrads and graduate students are going to be a huge problem. Sage
has been extremely exploitative of its unpaid developers in the past,
by securing grants to offset student tuition in exchange for using and
contributing to Sage. So many students are funded by grants,
government loans, TA/RAships that it's nearly impossible to determine
when they're getting paid to work on Sage. Also, students are
notoriously dishonest about how they spend their time. So in addition
to professors, we must not accept contributions from any kind of
student.

Imagine, if you will, a professor with malicious intent to make a paid
submission to Egas. Said professor could teach a class where the
students would learn how to use and contribute to Egas. The professor
could slip code snippets to their students and instruct them how to
flesh those snippets out and properly document that code. This is an
utterly unacceptable form of submission to Egas. Even though it
follows Bill's manifesto to the letter, it would result in a professor
getting paid and that resulting in a submission to Egas.

Nathann: this is barely a joke. I probably wouldn't have my PhD if it
wasn't for Sage; in part because of the funding I received, in part
because of Sage's role in my education on the topic of computational
mathematics, and in part because of the networking aspect of the Sage
community.

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[rjf]

Tom -- you have a phd?  What's the title of your thesis

This thread reminds me of

http://sci.tech-archive.net/Archive/sci.math.symbolic/2005-12/msg00096.html

... 11 years ago I asked if anyone would pay for Sage if it were not free.

RJF

> email to sage-flame+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

[Tom Boothby]

http://summit.sfu.ca/item/15868

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>

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[Tom Boothby]

Dang.

When I fed a troll my thesis, I expected some sort of vitriolic
discharge. Has somebody lost the ol' get-up-and-go, or just get stuck
on section 2.7?

So sad.

[Dima Pasechnik]

ahhh, D-Wave... Say no more!

(just trolling :-))

[Tom Boothby]

See, I expected that at the very least! I guess that part of being an
adult is becoming accustomed to disappointment.

I just thought RJF was different.

:'(

[rjf]

Troll? I don't see any troll. 

 Has Tom been hired by D-Wave?

Just looking at the title of Tom's dissertation, I have no interest

in reading it.  Part of being an adult is managing one's time.

RJF

On Monday, March 14, 2016 at 5:26:50 PM UTC-7, Tom wrote:

See, I expected that at the very least!  I guess that part of being an
adult is becoming accustomed to disappointment.

I just thought RJF was different.

:'(

On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 9:35 AM, Dima Pasechnik <dim...@gmail.com> wrote:
> ahhh, D-Wave... Say no more!
> (just trolling :-))
>
>
> On Saturday, March 12, 2016 at 6:13:35 PM UTC, Tom wrote:
>>
>> Dang.
>>
>> When I fed a troll my thesis, I expected some sort of vitriolic
>> discharge.  Has somebody lost the ol' get-up-and-go, or just get stuck
>> on section 2.7?
>>
>> So sad.
>
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[Tom Boothby]

Ah, a one-line dismissal. Surprisingly classy, 'round these parts.
Fortunately, I find validation elsewhere. Apparently, D-Wave sees
value in people whose theses have titles like mine.

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[Richard Fateman]

On 3/14/2016 10:08 PM, Tom Boothby wrote:
> Ah, a one-line dismissal. Surprisingly classy, 'round these parts.
> Fortunately, I find validation elsewhere. Apparently, D-Wave sees
> value in people whose theses have titles like mine.

Am I to infer that D-Wave has hired Tom?

Some fishing around tells me it is possible to (slightly) short D-Wave
by short selling
Harris and Harris (TINY).
Just a thought.