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| Dave... |
 Posted: Sun Nov 01, 2009 2:49 pm |
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TimDaly wrote:
[quote]You could try approaching TI and asking would they sell the source code, and if
so how much? Say you would approach some grant giving body to try to raise the
cash to pay for it.
I have tried on several occasions to get grants for the Axiom project.
The response has always been the same... join a university. But my
last university took over 50% of my grant money "for overhead".
And a university or a company is not going to hire me to write
literate documentation of an open source program like Derive.
[/quote]
They have a habit of that.
[quote]It seems there is no mechanism to give grants to projects that are not
affiliated with an organization that has an accounting department.
Since the NSF charter includes developing educational material it
seems they would support a literate rewrite for teaching and research
purposes. I spoke to the new NSF person this summer and they said
there
was no way they would issue a non-affiliated grant. Even the grant I
did get while at the university would not have been approved if it was
sent in independently.
[/quote]
There maybe other avenues, but joining a uni is probably the best. If you do not
intend to make your living from this, then you might be able to get a honorary
position, where they do not pay you, but it would allow you to submit a grant
from a uni.
[quote]I approached IBM about setting up an "open source accounting business"
which does nothing but receive and administer grant money for projects
that are open source. The idea is that the "open source accounting"
would process receipts against the grant (e.g. travel, equipment, etc)
just like a corporate accounting department. This would ensure that
the
money was spent in ways that could be tracked. IBM said no.
[/quote]
You do not surprise me there.
[quote]TI could issue the Derive lisp code "as a grant" but it seems
unlikely.
[/quote]
Well, they might just take you seriously if you ask for a price. They might come
to the conclusion it is worthy cause, and give it free.
[quote]Sun open-sourced most of Solaris 10, and certainly seemed to have gained from it.
My interest in Derive is documentation. I believe it should be
recast into a Knuth-style literate form so the next generation
can use it for study. In that sense, I see Derive as one of the
Newton notebooks of computational mathematics. I worry less
about tomorrow and more about the 30 year horizon.
Anyway, its all fantasy unless Texas Instruments changes its mind.
Tim
Asking for a price might be one way.
All of my computer algebra work is done in my free time and on my own
personal budget. Any price for the source code would be too much.
I certainly don't see that people would post money to pay for the
Derive source. Who would negotiate the contract and manage the funds?
[/quote]
I'm not suggesting you personally paid the cost. Just obtain a cost estimate.
There is no way you would have a hope in hell of going to a grant body if you
did not know the approximate cost.
[quote]Since TI does have an interest in the educational aspects perhaps
they might hire someone to make Derive literate. Then they can
leverage their investment to sell it to schools.
[/quote]
I know when I went to seminars organised by TI on Digital Signal Processors,
there answer on getting free hardware for DSP projects was "yes, now what do you
want?" I was basically told, if I wanted hardware for a DSP project, I could
have it. There were likely to be limits, if it was thousands of pounds worth of
hardware for one undergrad student project, but they were well aware it was good
to get students using TI DSP chips. Their motivation is probably not as strong
with Axiom.
[quote]That way the
source code would not be free but it would still live. TI could
make money on the teaching material supported by calculators
running the same software for classroom use. You could build a
couple courses around the literate sources. (Remember that my
interest is more about making it "live" rather than making it
"free").
Getting back to the original question about "Why Mathematica won",
I believe that you're assuming the conclusion, a logical fallacy.
(Of course, I'm assuming a different playing field; teaching
computational mathematics rather than commercial success so I
am assuming a different universe of discourse). You assume that
the current leader in sales will remain that way forever and
have a viable program that survives. I would have said the same
about Macsyma on Symbolics which was the "world leader" at some
point in my overlong past.
[/quote]
I was not the person who asked "Why Did Mathematica Win", and I'm not saying I
think it has won.
In fact, in the long term, I think something like Sage could take a very
substantial revenue from Wolfram Research. Lecturers must wake up to the fact
that its all very nice getting MMA cheaply for student use, but in the real
world, it is much harder to justify the commercial cost.
I made the point that if you search for job adverts, there are very few
requiring Mathematica skills. So I'm not sure it has 'won'.
[quote]Did Mathematica win? I think it is too soon to tell.
[/quote]
I will not disagree with that.
PS. I like Mathematica. Even wrote a web-based interface for it once.
http://witm.sourceforge.net/
But I've since come to the conclusion that the shortcomings of a closed source
program are very serious.
Dave |
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| Derek R O'Connor... |
| Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2009 11:26 am |
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<snip>
Martin wrote:
"PS: I know how to write programs in C, but I'm still using 40-kilobyte
zero-bug Turbo Pascal in a DOS window; I've seen nothing better since
then for small to medium everyday tasks. Similarly, Derive will still be
excellent 25 years from now."
To me, a more important question is "Why did Pascal Fail?"
Derek O'Connor |
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| TimDaly... |
| Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2009 1:36 pm |
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Guest
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On Nov 18, 4:26 pm, Derek R O'Connor <derekrocon... at (no spam) eircom.net> wrote:
[quote]snip
Martin wrote:
"PS: I know how to write programs in C, but I'm still using 40-kilobyte
zero-bug Turbo Pascal in a DOS window; I've seen nothing better since
then for small to medium everyday tasks. Similarly, Derive will still be
excellent 25 years from now."
To me, a more important question is "Why did Pascal Fail?"
Derek O'Connor
[/quote]
They gave it enough String and it hung itself?  --Tim |
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| ... |
| Posted: Thu Nov 19, 2009 10:14 am |
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Guest
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In article <8c53dc4b-327d-4dc5-9dfb-dbad75502e85 at (no spam) g23g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>,
TimDaly <daly at (no spam) axiom-developer.org> wrote:
[quote]On Nov 18, 4:26=A0pm, Derek R O'Connor <derekrocon... at (no spam) eircom.net> wrote:
snip
Martin wrote:
"PS: I know how to write programs in C, but I'm still using 40-kilobyte
zero-bug Turbo Pascal in a DOS window; I've seen nothing better since
then for small to medium everyday tasks. Similarly, Derive will still be
excellent 25 years from now."
To me, a more important question is "Why did Pascal Fail?"
Derek O'Connor
They gave it enough String and it hung itself? --Tim
[/quote]
They added address-of to pointers and it got lost?
It is still evaluating a non-short curcuited boolean?
But even though the use of Pascal has decreased over time, I wouldn't
wouldn't say it failed. It succeeded in its design goals, became
extremely popular, and then was extended to be something different for
which there were eventually more popular alternatives.
People got tired of typing the extra : on assignment statements?
--
Steven Bellenot http://www.math.fsu.edu/~bellenot
Professor and Associate Chair phone: (850) 644-7405
Department of Mathematics office: 223 Love
Florida State University email: bellenot at math.fsu.edu |
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