Tim Daly here... There were quite a few challenges before Axiom could be open sourced. NAG released the Axiom sources to me around that time. I gave an invite

Tim Daly here... There were quite a few challenges before Axiom could be open sourced. NAG released the Axiom sources to me around that time. I gave an invited talk in Paris. There were many issues to solve. The primary one was that you needed a running Axiom to build Axiom. I was not allowed to distribute the NAG version of a running Axiom. It took a long time to restructure the system so it could be built from sources. Portions of the NAG version were never distributed to me and I had to recreate some from scratch. GNU hosting and Sourceforge hosting were new technologies I had to master. I also struggled to understand how to create and lead an open source effort. Obviously in hindsight I'm very bad at management. The NAG version of the system removed the Common Lisp version of AKCL, (of which I'm a minor author). AKCL is now GNU GCL under Camm. IBM Research sponsored the creation of AKCL under contract which was developed by Bill Schelter. Bill and I were in constant contact and he used my office on his site visits. I had to re-host Axiom on AKCL from the NAG version but Bill was dead by then. Back then I was working at City College of New York in the CAISS effort involving Infinite Group Theory (Magnus). I maintained, modified, and extended that effort and made it open source. Axiom was not part of my job effort until the last few months of my time there. Axiom was all after-hours / off-the-clock work. (I see my name has been "scrubbed" from the CAISS/Magnus work. They even mention Axiom but not me. Sigh.) Axiom is now exploring new research ideas combining computer algebra and proof theory (aka computational mathematics). The computer algebra people don't do proofs and the proof people don't do computer algebra algorithms. In fact, of the few hundred papers I reviewed only James Davenport made the bibliography section in both areas. I'm not expecting any enthusiasm for this research. If I fail no one will notice. If I succeed ... no one will notice :-) But I'm having fun.