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Closed source? Why hack it then? Why waste the effort to learn it or customize it? It's kind of like the new/gnu reality, where the GPL, designed to protect th

Closed source? Why hack it then? Why waste the effort to learn it or customize it? It's kind of like the new/gnu reality, where the GPL, designed to protect the authors from commercial exploitation, makes this exact exploitation easier than less restrictive OSS licenses... Making money off a text editor is going to be hard. Especially when it is meant to be hackable.

hdevalence 13y ago
For an excellent description of another instance of this sort of issue, see [1] about Canonical and Mir. Github seems to have things pretty figured out: they have a closed core that they control, with a veneer of hackability, and a lot of hype. You then get people to work for you for free by having them create plugins that, while open source, are effectively controlled by Github, Inc. The key thing is to make people feel that they're contributing to a community, even though that community doesn't really have ownership of the work. By the time the tension between the community's needs and Github's needs comes out, you've already locked everyone into your ecosystem. Other notable instances of this phenomenon include the MAGMA computer algebra system, and the creation of SAGE (see [2]). [1]: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html [2]: http://sagemath.blogspot.ca/2009/12/mathematical-software-and-me-very.html http://sagemath.blogspot.ca/2009/12/mathematical-software-an...
- est 13y ago
  Interesting story of SAGE here. What happened to it? Nowadays it seems that numpy/scipy has more users and community attention.
  - hdevalence 13y ago
    SAGE is still going very strong. numpy/scipy have very many more users, but I don't think that they're really comparable: they're aimed at numerical computation for science, while SAGE aims to be a do-everything tool for mathematics. All of scipy/numpy is actually included in SAGE, and you can interoperate between numpy stuff, and, say, exact rational arithmetic, or group theory, etc.
    - rz2k 13y ago
      And you can use R and Octave in a worksheet, too, but my understanding is that the point of SAGE is much closer to a superset of the types of functionalities that you find in SymPy. That is, that it is meant for symbolic manipulation.
  - bentoner 13y ago
    Sage is going strong. Their new cloud service https://cloud.sagemath.com/ https://cloud.sagemath.com/ is fantastic (multiplayer ipython omg). Amusingly, they are also going partially-closed source: http://sagemath.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/what-is-sagemathcloud.html http://sagemath.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/what-is-sagemathclou...

hdevalence 13y ago

For an excellent description of another instance of this sort of issue, see [1] about Canonical and Mir. Github seems to have things pretty figured out: they have a closed core that they control, with a veneer of hackability, and a lot of hype. You then get people to work for you for free by having them create plugins that, while open source, are effectively controlled by Github, Inc. The key thing is to make people feel that they're contributing to a community, even though that community doesn't really have ownership of the work. By the time the tension between the community's needs and Github's needs comes out, you've already locked everyone into your ecosystem. Other notable instances of this phenomenon include the MAGMA computer algebra system, and the creation of SAGE (see [2]). [1]: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html [2]: http://sagemath.blogspot.ca/2009/12/mathematical-software-and-me-very.html http://sagemath.blogspot.ca/2009/12/mathematical-software-an...

est 13y ago
Interesting story of SAGE here. What happened to it? Nowadays it seems that numpy/scipy has more users and community attention.
- hdevalence 13y ago
  SAGE is still going very strong. numpy/scipy have very many more users, but I don't think that they're really comparable: they're aimed at numerical computation for science, while SAGE aims to be a do-everything tool for mathematics. All of scipy/numpy is actually included in SAGE, and you can interoperate between numpy stuff, and, say, exact rational arithmetic, or group theory, etc.
  - rz2k 13y ago
    And you can use R and Octave in a worksheet, too, but my understanding is that the point of SAGE is much closer to a superset of the types of functionalities that you find in SymPy. That is, that it is meant for symbolic manipulation.
- bentoner 13y ago
  Sage is going strong. Their new cloud service https://cloud.sagemath.com/ https://cloud.sagemath.com/ is fantastic (multiplayer ipython omg). Amusingly, they are also going partially-closed source: http://sagemath.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/what-is-sagemathcloud.html http://sagemath.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/what-is-sagemathclou...