The Story of SageMath

The Story of SageMath

The story of SageMath. http://wstein.org/papers/talks/2016-06-sage-bp/bp.pdf

excellent story, if you want to know about math software, open source, academia.

here's video version.

sagemath, and the damnation of the open source

sagemath. sad. broken website. missing pictures. https://wiki.sagemath.org/art?action=show&redirect=pics

download pages looks like 1999. http://www.sagemath.org/download.html

the damnation of the open source

https://plus.google.com/+XahLee/posts/aNMAmKVvVYF

i heard his story of going commercial. (even retweeted it last year on twitter)

i've heard of sagemath for 10 years. I thought it's the great open source math program. Even recommend to clueless newbies. Never used it though. But only started to do math again now, so i tried to download for the first time.

and, the first impression, of its website and download page, is very sad. it reminds me all the pain of the open source.

first i go to go the website. Check out the pic demo. Sadly, 80% of pictures don't show.

i went to download page, to download anyway. I was expecting one single download button as software sites are today, which it'll just download whatever version of my os. But no, i got this wtf list of mirror sites of 1999. Quite confusing, and Virus is on my mind. And, the Mac download page has a app and non-app version, with explanation about which to download. That's one complete screwup.

i haven't tried to launch it yet. But so far, it's not encouraging. At this point, it's probably a correct guess, that if you need math lightly, just goto wolframalpha. And if you use math heavily, just $300 to Mathematica.

i wish sagemath is good, i hope it is. But open source, i think it's a sad pipe dream failure.

i hope he's successful though.