> For further elaboration, see
> http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/euromath-future.txt
> which dates to 1996, and see if you see SAGE in it.
Sage was first released in 2005. That's 9 years after you wrote that
document. Is your claim that we don't exist because you didn't predict that
we'd be here? Oh, but wait. I see Sage right at the bottom of section II.
"In principle, cooperation among academic systems may provide a path
to salvation by assembling one "super" free-ware system, supported
and shared by many. There are a very few examples (e.g. Linux, Gnu software,
TeX) but I doubt that the academics in this field will buy into such
a shared responsibility for system. It hasn't happened in the past."
So, you're a pessimist, not a solipist. That's a relief. But it still looks
like your prediction was wrong after all. Dozens of academics have now bought
into this shared responsibility, and we're loving it. Furthermore, you really
can't call Linux, TeX, et. al. anomalous these days. Open source software is
mainstream, and Sage is here to stay.
You criticize Sage for wanting to "eat" other projects. But what you are doing
is much more harmful -- it sounds as though you're trying to turn the Maxima
community against Sage for some reason. Please stop this. It is immature, and
totally uncalled-for. We truly stand on the shoulders of giants - without the
work of Maxima, Gap, Pari... developers, Sage would be *way* behind its current
state. We're very grateful to the communities surrounding these other systems.
We want to provide an alternative to the closed source math software. Sometimes our goals overlap with other systems. We can still coexist, and thrive togeter. Hell -- Gnome and KDE play so nicely on my system, the only reason I know that I've got KDE apps is because they conspicuously start with a K. Remember when the Gnome/KDE "holy war" was worse than vi vs. emacs? Those projects have 100% target market overlap. If they can work together, we can too.
--tom