
Sage Math Cloud - sdenton4
http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-is-sagemathcloud-lets-clear-some.html
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lutusp
Since I got involved with Sage years ago, I've always liked William Stein's
candid way of describing the project's activities. If the project failed to
meet a stated objective, Stein would say, "We failed". No public-relations
rhetoric, no glossing over, just the facts.

The basic issue for Sage is that it's gotten too large and complex, and too
Linux-platform-dependent, to be a simple install on the majority of student
machines. And with each new release, it's become larger and less accessible to
many end users, most of whom run Windows on a limited-capacity PC.

Early on, someone created an installation package that ran Sage in a drop-in
virtual machine that ran under Windows, but that approach quickly unraveled as
Sage became larger and too much of a burden for a small system. This means
that, at present, unless a person is willing to dual-boot Linux or run Linux
alone, they can't run Sage locally.

Sage on a server has problems of its own -- which server, where, at what cost?
But on the positive side, even when running on a single system, Sage behaves
like a server-side application, so little needs to be changed for this
strategy.

I hope this turns out to make Sage more popular and accessible -- IMHO it's a
great mathematical tool, and the project's open-source philosophy only
increases my respect.

My Sage tutorial: [http://arachnoid.com/sage](http://arachnoid.com/sage)

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jordigh
> too Linux-platform-dependent,

Can you expand upon this? Not even Unix dependent, but precisely Linux?
There's no hope of getting it to work with, say, homebrew on Mac OS X either?

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
There are mac binaries.

Part of the issue for sage with tying into a lot of academic software is it
has to tie into a lot of academic software, and that sort of stuff isn't
always made with a lot of concern beyond 'can the graduate student compile it
on the graduate student's machine and maybe the local cluster.'

~~~
jordigh
That's typically only true for really obscure things, but not for well-
established projects like GAP, Singular, or Scipy. So what part of Sage is in
this state? Are people contributing to Sage itself but failing to provide any
reasonable infrastructure to support that software?

~~~
judk
People don't "contribute" math components to Sage, for the most part. Sage is
like Debian or Slackware: it is a distro: a "bag" holding a giant bag of any
third party program/library that the maintainers are able to compile and run
in the distro bundle; plus a high level shell (akin in function to a
Desktop/WM like xfce or unity)

~~~
jordigh
I know that there are some pretty big components that are Sage-only, like the
sage-combinat package, and I know the people working on it are packaging it
correctly (i.e. no grad-student kind of work). I don't know what proportion of
the work goes into such components instead of integrating every other major
free math software out there.

I'm just surprised to see Sage getting accusations of grad-student level of
maintainership code. Are they really scrambling that much outside of the
mature math projects for code?

~~~
judk
Yes. USA institutions are happy to pay for commercially licensed software, but
refuse to pay non-tenured-profs to write open source software, AMD refuse to
assert scientific ethics and send their license dollars to open source
projects.

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sdenton4
The interesting thing in this write up ifs the difficulty of securing funding
to take care of some of these basic usability issues, or hire dedicated
developers. A lot of the difficulty is that there are lots of people working
on sage, but all of the incentives for the involved researchers and grad
students is on writing papers and advancing their own research; there are
almost no rewards for improving usability. The job market is brutal, and this
kind of computational work simply isn't valued by hiring committees.

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bencollier49
If this gets popular and they try to sell to UK customers, I would imagine
that there'll be a trademark problem.

