|
|
|
|
|
|
by cantastoria
3933 days ago
|
|
|
I think they made the right decision. I've seen way too many open source projects run by academics die a sudden death when the two or three professors that were maintaining them decide they didn't want to do it anymore (or retired). In my experience, most academics are using open source tools not because they are better or even "open" but because they are free.
Few users (if any) ever contribute code back to the project beyond
the occasional bug report making them essentially just as dependent
on the core maintainers as they would be on any commercial company. |
|
|
In fact the history of mathematical software shows precisely the opposite of what you claim. Companies go belly up and unless that mathematical software is open sourced, it dies completely. There are many examples of this. Sagemath in fact contains some code which came from a formerly commercial source (Maxima, formerly Macsyma), which was later open sourced.
You also miss that Magma is run by a group of academics at the University of Sydney, and there is real concern what will happen to it when the person running the project retires. Magma is not open source, and it is a very real risk that it will just die.
William Stein's understandable frustration is at the paucity of funding for a project as large as Sagemath, on which so many people are relying. He has written a series of blog posts over the last little while outlining his frustrations. It seems that his last post on the issue led to someone being "100% sure" the Simons foundation would write a cheque. William is demonstrating how very false that is. The assumption is that it should be easy to find a source of funding for such a large and important body of work. But counterintuitively, this has not proved to be the case.