Re: [sage-devel] Re: Sources of funding - perhaps computer manufacturers?
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William Stein
Sep 30, 2015, 2:26:37 PM9/30/15
to sage-devel, Kirkby Microwave, sage-edu, sage-ma...@googlegroups.com, Gregory Bard
On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 7:55 AM, Bill Hart <goodwi...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> What analysis has been done of the weak spots of Sage?
[...]
> Question: what is Sage's strategy[...]?
Here is Sage's strategy, or at least what my strategy toward Sage has
been for the last 5 years.
1. Diagnose the problem:
Statement of problem: SageMath is not growing.
Justification:
Facts: Growth in the number of active users [1] of SageMath has
stalled since about 2011 (as defined by Google analytics on
sagemath.org). From 2008 to 2011, year-on-year growth was about 50%,
which isn't great. However, from 2011 to now, year-on-year growth is
slightly less than 0%. It was maybe -10% from 2013 to 2014.
Incidentally, number of monthly active users of sagemath.org is about
68,652 right now, but the raw number isn't as import as the
year-to-year rate of change.
I set an overall mission statement for the Sage project at the outset,
which was is to be a viable alternative to the Ma's. Being a "viable
alternative" is something that holds or doesn't for specific people.
A useful measure of this mission then is whether or not people use
Sage. This is a different metric than trying to argue from "first
principles" by making a list of features of each system, comparing
benchmarks, etc., like Bill H. suggests above.
2. Guiding policies:
Statement of policy: focus on undergraduate students in STEM courses
(science, tech, engineering, math)
Justification:
In order for Sage to start growing again, identify groups of people
that are not using Sage. Then decide, for each of these groups, who
might find value in using Sage, especially if we are able to put work
into making it easier for them to benefit from Sage. This is
something to re-evaluate periodically.
In itself, this is very generic -- it's what any software project that
wishes to grow should do. The interesting part is the details.
Some big groups of potential future users of Sage, who use Sage very
little now, include:
- employees/engineers in various industries (from defense contractors,
to finance, to health care to "data science").
- researchers in area of mathematics where Sage is currently not popular
- undergraduate students in STEM courses (science, tech, engineering, math)
I think by far the most promising group is "undergraduate students in
STEM courses". In many cases they use no software at all or are
unhappy with what they do use. They are extremely cost sensitive.
Open source provides a unique advantage in education because it is
less expensive than closed source software, and having access to
source code is something that instructors consider valuable as part of
the learning experience. Also, state of the art performance, which
often requires enormous dedicated for-pay work, is frequently not a
requirement.
3. Actions:
- (a) Make access to Sage as easy as possible.
- (b) Encourage the creation of educational resources (books,
tutorials, etc.) that make using Sage for particular courses as easy
as possible.
- (c) Implement missing functionality in Sage that is needed in
support of undergraduate teaching.
Justification:
Why don't more undergraduates use Sage? For the most part, students
use what they are told to use by their instructors. So why don't
instructors chose to use Sage? (a) Sage is not trivial to install
(in fact it is incredibly hard to install), (b) There are limited
resources (books, tutorials, course materials, etc.) for making using
Sage really easy, (c) Sage is missing key functionality needed in
support undergraduate teaching.
Regarding (c), in 2008 Sage was utterly useless for most STEM courses.
However, over the years things changed for the better, due to the hard
work of Rob Beezer, Karl Dieter, Burcin Erocal, and many others.
Also, for quite a bit of STEM work, the numerical Python ecosystem
(and/or R) provides much of what is needed, and both have evolved
enormously in recent years. They are all usable from Sage, and
making such use *easier* should be an extremely high priority.
Related -- Bill Hart wrote "I recently sat down with some serious
developers and we discussed symbolics in Sage (which I know nothing
about). They argued that Sage is not a viable contender in that area,
and we discussed some of the possible reasons for that. " The reason
is that the symbolic functionality in Sage is motivated by making Sage
useful for undergraduate teaching; it has nothing to do with what
serious developers in symbolics would care about.
Regarding (b), an NSF (called "UTMOST") helped in this direction...
Also, Gregory Bard wrote "Sage for undergraduates", which is *exactly*
the sort of thing we should be very strongly encouraging. This is a
book that is published by the AMS and is also freely available. And
it squarely addresses exactly this audience. Similarly, the French
book that Paul Zimmerman edited is fantastic for France. Let's make
an order of magnitude similar resources along these lines! Let's
make vastly more tutorials and reference manuals that are "for
undergraduates".
Regarding (a), in my opinion the most viable option that fits with
current trends in software is a full web application that provides
access to Sage. SageMathCloud is what I've been doing in this
direction, and it's been growing since 2013 at over 100% year on year,
and much is in place so that it could scale up to more users. It
still has a huge way to go regarding user friendliness, and it is
still *losing money every month*. But it is a concrete action toward
which nontrivial effort has been invested, and it has the potential to
solve problem (a) for a large number of potential STEM users.
College students very often have extremely good bandwidth coupled with
cheap weak laptops, so a web application is the natural solution for
them.
Though much has been done to make Sage easier to install on individual
computers, it's exactly the sort of problem that money could help
solve, but for which we have little money. I'm optimistic that
OpenDreamKit will do something in this direction.
-- William
[1] I've attached plots of "active monthly users" for sagemath.org
and cloud.sagemath.com. Which is which should be clear.
--
William (http://wstein.org)
> What analysis has been done of the weak spots of Sage?
[...]
> Question: what is Sage's strategy[...]?
Here is Sage's strategy, or at least what my strategy toward Sage has
been for the last 5 years.
1. Diagnose the problem:
Statement of problem: SageMath is not growing.
Justification:
Facts: Growth in the number of active users [1] of SageMath has
stalled since about 2011 (as defined by Google analytics on
sagemath.org). From 2008 to 2011, year-on-year growth was about 50%,
which isn't great. However, from 2011 to now, year-on-year growth is
slightly less than 0%. It was maybe -10% from 2013 to 2014.
Incidentally, number of monthly active users of sagemath.org is about
68,652 right now, but the raw number isn't as import as the
year-to-year rate of change.
I set an overall mission statement for the Sage project at the outset,
which was is to be a viable alternative to the Ma's. Being a "viable
alternative" is something that holds or doesn't for specific people.
A useful measure of this mission then is whether or not people use
Sage. This is a different metric than trying to argue from "first
principles" by making a list of features of each system, comparing
benchmarks, etc., like Bill H. suggests above.
2. Guiding policies:
Statement of policy: focus on undergraduate students in STEM courses
(science, tech, engineering, math)
Justification:
In order for Sage to start growing again, identify groups of people
that are not using Sage. Then decide, for each of these groups, who
might find value in using Sage, especially if we are able to put work
into making it easier for them to benefit from Sage. This is
something to re-evaluate periodically.
In itself, this is very generic -- it's what any software project that
wishes to grow should do. The interesting part is the details.
Some big groups of potential future users of Sage, who use Sage very
little now, include:
- employees/engineers in various industries (from defense contractors,
to finance, to health care to "data science").
- researchers in area of mathematics where Sage is currently not popular
- undergraduate students in STEM courses (science, tech, engineering, math)
I think by far the most promising group is "undergraduate students in
STEM courses". In many cases they use no software at all or are
unhappy with what they do use. They are extremely cost sensitive.
Open source provides a unique advantage in education because it is
less expensive than closed source software, and having access to
source code is something that instructors consider valuable as part of
the learning experience. Also, state of the art performance, which
often requires enormous dedicated for-pay work, is frequently not a
requirement.
3. Actions:
- (a) Make access to Sage as easy as possible.
- (b) Encourage the creation of educational resources (books,
tutorials, etc.) that make using Sage for particular courses as easy
as possible.
- (c) Implement missing functionality in Sage that is needed in
support of undergraduate teaching.
Justification:
Why don't more undergraduates use Sage? For the most part, students
use what they are told to use by their instructors. So why don't
instructors chose to use Sage? (a) Sage is not trivial to install
(in fact it is incredibly hard to install), (b) There are limited
resources (books, tutorials, course materials, etc.) for making using
Sage really easy, (c) Sage is missing key functionality needed in
support undergraduate teaching.
Regarding (c), in 2008 Sage was utterly useless for most STEM courses.
However, over the years things changed for the better, due to the hard
work of Rob Beezer, Karl Dieter, Burcin Erocal, and many others.
Also, for quite a bit of STEM work, the numerical Python ecosystem
(and/or R) provides much of what is needed, and both have evolved
enormously in recent years. They are all usable from Sage, and
making such use *easier* should be an extremely high priority.
Related -- Bill Hart wrote "I recently sat down with some serious
developers and we discussed symbolics in Sage (which I know nothing
about). They argued that Sage is not a viable contender in that area,
and we discussed some of the possible reasons for that. " The reason
is that the symbolic functionality in Sage is motivated by making Sage
useful for undergraduate teaching; it has nothing to do with what
serious developers in symbolics would care about.
Regarding (b), an NSF (called "UTMOST") helped in this direction...
Also, Gregory Bard wrote "Sage for undergraduates", which is *exactly*
the sort of thing we should be very strongly encouraging. This is a
book that is published by the AMS and is also freely available. And
it squarely addresses exactly this audience. Similarly, the French
book that Paul Zimmerman edited is fantastic for France. Let's make
an order of magnitude similar resources along these lines! Let's
make vastly more tutorials and reference manuals that are "for
undergraduates".
Regarding (a), in my opinion the most viable option that fits with
current trends in software is a full web application that provides
access to Sage. SageMathCloud is what I've been doing in this
direction, and it's been growing since 2013 at over 100% year on year,
and much is in place so that it could scale up to more users. It
still has a huge way to go regarding user friendliness, and it is
still *losing money every month*. But it is a concrete action toward
which nontrivial effort has been invested, and it has the potential to
solve problem (a) for a large number of potential STEM users.
College students very often have extremely good bandwidth coupled with
cheap weak laptops, so a web application is the natural solution for
them.
Though much has been done to make Sage easier to install on individual
computers, it's exactly the sort of problem that money could help
solve, but for which we have little money. I'm optimistic that
OpenDreamKit will do something in this direction.
-- William
[1] I've attached plots of "active monthly users" for sagemath.org
and cloud.sagemath.com. Which is which should be clear.
--
William (http://wstein.org)
Jonathan Coupe
Sep 30, 2015, 2:50:08 PM9/30/15
to sage-ma...@googlegroups.com
On 30 September 2015 at 19:25, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 7:55 AM, Bill Hart <goodwi...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> What analysis has been done of the weak spots of Sage?
[...]
> Question: what is Sage's strategy[...]?
It sounds me Prof Stein has an excellent grip of software marketing strategy , but it might still be worth reading Moore's books:
Other than that, I think the key problem is motivating instructors to use Sage instead of Ma*. It's harder because teaching students one of the Ma's gives them a job skill - commercial use reinforces academic use and vice versa; it's a hard circle to break. The way Moore would suggest doing this is by looking at niches one at a time and attacking them with superior feature for that niche, using profits from one to take the next. But of course such profits don't exist for Sage - open source succeeds when there is a gap to be filled and someone who needs that gap filled sees the possibility of using/adapting the software to fill it. I'm not sure that there *are* such gaps for Sage.
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