> Sounds good, so why am I queasy?
>
> There are, in my opinion, other open source alternatives [VOSA] (Maxima,
> Axiom, XCAS, Octave ...) that could be substituted for Sage in the sentence
> above.
>
> What William Stein may be saying (or rather not saying) is that yes, there
> are all these other programs that you can download free and run as
> alternatives to the named programs, but we won't mention them since they
> are, in terms of our philosophy not VIABLE!
>
> Eh? By the SAGE DEFINITION a system is NOT VIABLE if you cannot compile all
> the components from scratch on your computer with free software. Even if you
> can do it, the system STILL MAY NOT BE VIABLE if there is someone else who
> can't compile it from scratch on one of HIS computers.
With respect to the Sage "mission statement", I don't think anyone
associated with the project uses that in their definition of
viability. I see being able to compile from source as more of a
pragmatic stance for our project since it reduces the dependencies on
binaries provided by others. It also makes it easier to port Sage to
new systems / architectures.
> Now there are many people who have compared
> Maxima/Axiom/XCAS/Maple/Mathematica/Matlab and found one or the other to be
> lacking in various respects. This ranges from "uses different syntax" to
> "doesn't know enough about ODEs" or "factors integers too slowly" or
> "doesn't know enough statistics" or "plots don't rotate in real time" etc.
>
> But the Sage philosophy seems to say "oh, these are all equivalent." But
> none of them is acceptable because they are not VIABLE.
I don't understand what you mean when you say "oh, these are all equivalent".
> So Sage staff (volunteer or paid) must work on them to make one of them
> viable, e.g. strain to make one compilable on every computer.
>
> * Instead of finding a remedy to some bug in Maxima or Axiom, or add
> features that provide value beyond that available in Maple or Mathematica,
> or Magma or Matlab, staff will be devoted to fulfilling an essentially
> political statement about free speech.
>
> Aside: This generalization is somewhat unfair regarding Sage in some domains
> because of the interests of the main investigator, since he and/or his
> collaborators are actually interested in some scientific questions: finding
> or designing alternatives (e.g. for number theory) that are fast. That's OK,
> and probably constitutes a research agenda of a more or less traditional
> form. William Stein says--
> "Most importantly, Sage-3.0 finally has code for computing with modular
> abelian varieties. You almost certainly have no clue what those are, but
> suffice to say that I started the Sage project to compute with them, so
> having this code in Sage is a major milestone for me and the project."
> Anyway this fast algebra stuff is (probably) not based on some wobbly
> political consideration.
I would say a fair amount of the code in Sage has written for /
motivated by research needs. I first got involved with the project
after I had already written a fair amount of Python code for my own
research. That is the motivation behind sage-combinat group:
http://wiki.sagemath.org/combinat .
--Mike