from the some-folks-still-claim-algorithms-are-copyrightable dept.
Information Today reports
Sage, the free and open source analog to Wolfram Research's Mathematica, is now SageMathCloud . Thanks to collaboration with Google's cloud services, Sage is now in a position to draw more mathematicians to its community.
In a blog announcement of the collaboration, Google throws down a gauntlet against claims of ownership of mathematical truths by the likes of Wolfram:Modern mathematics research is distinguished by its openness. The notion of "mathematical truth" depends on theorems being published with proof, letting the reader understand how new results build on the old, all the way down to basic mathematical axioms and definitions. These new results become tools to aid further progress.
[...]Wolfram (like Google) is a for-profit enterprise (Mathematica’s prices are here), and as such, it is keen to protect its software and even its software’s calculations. Wolfram holds the position that because the information generated by its software is novel, the results of its calculations may be subject to copyright by Wolfram.
[...]Marshall Hampton, associate professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, is an advocate of open math who uses R in his bioinformatics work. He says, "I use the free, open-source program/environment Sage in all of my work; I encourage you to try it and contribute to it if you can." R is [a separate program that is also distributed as] part of Sage, and "Sage includes many independent open projects that I find helpful, such as Gfan and Biopython. The typesetting language LaTeX is another open tool I use daily." Hampton expresses a critical view of the idea that Wolfram or anyone else can copyright math: "I think any claim of copyright on a calculation is pretty ridiculous."
[...]new open-licensed and open source languages have quickly gained ground. Julia, SALOME, ScicosLab, X10, Scilab, Chapel, Gmsh, Fortress, and FreeMat are all available under GNU-compatible licensing.
[Ed's note: updated to clarify that R is a separate application that Sage has chosen to include.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @01:07AM
Why is copyrighting a specific sequence of mathematical symbols and numbers absurd when doing the same thing to a specific orderings of words OK?
What's absurd is that human progress has royalties for life of the author + 70 years.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by CirclesInSand on Friday November 14 2014, @02:32AM
Ever hear a child scream "mommy he's copying me"? That's the real reason of copy law. A bunch is whiny brats afraid that someone might want to play the same game as them, deluded into thinking that they are some sort of unique genius who is the first to do whatever they are doing and that the entirety of human kind would be completely lost without their contribution. That actually applies more to patents, but patents are just another form of copy law.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday November 14 2014, @07:52AM
The specific sequence of words is only copyrightable if it is the result of a creative act. If you make an alphabetical list of all words appearing in Hamlet, that's not copyrightable. What a CAS does is effectively the equivalent to sorting the words of Hamlet. Sure, the algorithms involved are more complicated, but there's no creative act in producing the output.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Informative) by physicsmajor on Friday November 14 2014, @01:13AM
Sage is great. I love the project. However it's being presented as its own thing here, rather than correctly noting that it's built using Python! The scientific Python ecosystem really should be credited. BSD licensed across the board, and at least as important if not more so then any other entry in the summary's concluding link chain.
Also, R is included in Sage the distribution, but R the project is not "part of Sage" - this is where language matters, and the R community could really have a problem with that line.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 14 2014, @07:27AM
Python is great. I love the project. However it's being presented as its own thing here, rather than correctly noting that it's built using C! The C ecosystem really should be credited, they're the ones who managed to create a self-contained high-level programming language ecosystem.
Okay, so I'm not actually all that familiar with Sage, but it sounds like it's a heck of a lot more than a wrapper around some scientific python code - and in point of fact I personally used many of the real "heavy hitters" in the collection long before Python existed. What makes you feel that the Python-based elements are the ones carrying the show?
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday November 14 2014, @12:54PM
Good catch! I had not used any of these packages, so I was unaware of this. I've updated the story to clarify this separation. Thanks!
By the way, I've heard rumors they will call the next two releases "Rosemary" and "Thyme". =) (With apologies to Simon and Garfunkel.)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 1) by wstein on Friday November 14 2014, @05:56PM
Sage is a collection of about 100 open source packages combined with over 500,000 lines of completely new code written over the last ten years. The new code is for providing new Python interfaces to other packages and libraries, implementing new algorithms not implemented anywhere else at all (there's a ton of this motivated by research mathematics), implementing algorithms that only exist in close source packages (again, there are tons of such things), and other functionality motivated by education or visualization that is not provided at all in the scientific Python stack (e.g., good math oriented 3d graphics). Also, many of the "roughly 100 open source packages" have contributions or are run by people who are also involved with Sage development. Sage was started (by me) primarily for pure mathematics, not scientific computing or statistics; several years after starting Sage, I added R and also numpy due to popular demand by users of Sage.
(Score: 4, Funny) by CirclesInSand on Friday November 14 2014, @01:39AM
Can't disagree with google here. I never liked the design of Mathematica. I especially don't like how it is marketed as a "math tool" rather than what it actually is: an expression manipulation program, and with poor modular design at that. It's in the category of "great if you want to do exactly what the authors want you to do", but mathematics is supposed to be a very general subject capable of expressing anything.
On the other hand, claiming that the clusterfuck that is sage is the the answer is laughable. Mathematica's design motto is "design now and only the holy circle of wizards gets to be a part of this", while Sage's motto is "write now and consider design later". It will probably be a few generations before any decent mathematics assistant is ready, and it won't be based on either of these atrocities.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday November 14 2014, @01:43AM
I concur: simplifying expressions in Maxima (included in Sage) is such a pain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by CirclesInSand on Friday November 14 2014, @01:48AM
Sage uses (unless it has changed recently) Maxima for it's expression engine for those who don't know. And it is a pain, way too much is done automatically, just trying to do it your own way is very difficult, as in it's harder than just using copy/paste in notepad.
(Score: 1) by wstein on Friday November 14 2014, @06:02PM
> Sage uses (unless it has changed recently) Maxima for it's expression engine
This is misleading. Sage used it's own custom symbolic expression engine in 2007. From 2008-2009 it used Maxima to represent and do most operations with symbolic expression. From about June 2009 until today (for over 5 years now), Sage symbolic expressions are represented and manipulated using a version of GINAC (http://www.ginac.de/) that we adapted for use from Cython. Maxima is still used by default to compute a symbolic integral and for the full simplify command, though one can also use sympy (it's an algorithm= option). All that said, symbolic manipulation is just a tiny part of what Sage is really about, just like "Calculus" is a very, very tiny part of what mathematics itself is about.
(Score: 1) by CirclesInSand on Saturday November 15 2014, @03:18AM
To be pedantic, the term "calculus" nearly defines mathematics. The mechanic of analysis is the physical manifestation of mathematics. "Differential calculus", on the other hand, is a completely different matter.
(Score: 1) by wstein on Friday November 14 2014, @06:06PM
> while Sage's motto is "write now and consider design later".
That is not our motto. Our official mission statement is "create a viable free open source alternative to Mathematica, Maple, Magma, and Matlab". The closest thing we have to a moto is: "emphasize openness, community, cooperation, and collaboration" and "we are building the car, not reinventing the wheel."
There has been an enormous amount of longterm thought and work put into design (e.g., see the Sage coercion model). This is documented on the sage-devel mailing lists, our trac server, and the notes from the nearly 70 week-long Sage Days Workshops we've had (http://wiki.sagemath.org/Workshops), many of which involve long intense design discussions. Anyone who has written complicated software will know that software design is not easy, though criticizing it after the fact in no concrete way is.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday November 14 2014, @11:03AM
Did the headline get truncated or was it just trying to invoke nerdrage by implying that Wolfram had copyrighted sums?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday November 14 2014, @12:53PM
The first-linked article at Information Today [infotoday.com] has the exact same [seemingly truncated] title: "Big Numbers: Google Challenges Wolfram to Open Up Math" and that was submitted as the title of the original story, too.
I cannot tell for certain what was in the mind of that story's author, but my guess is that it was short for "mathematics" instead of "Mathematica". Since I saw nothing in the linked stories suggesting that Wolfram was being asked to open up the code to Mathematica itself, it lends further credence to the word "mathematics" being intended in this case.
Excellent question!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday November 14 2014, @11:58AM
Well, "may be" subject to copyright is vague. They're either subject or not. Is Wolfram claiming a copyright on the output from their program or not? They either are or they aren't.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @05:49PM
They do claim copyright to the results of Wolfram Alpha.
(Score: 1) by UncleSlacky on Friday November 14 2014, @12:26PM
Other FOSS mathematical packages are available...(though personally I'd just use Fortran).
(Score: 1) by wstein on Friday November 14 2014, @06:09PM
> Other FOSS mathematical packages are available...(though personally I'd just use Fortran).
Sage includes many FOSS mathematical packages. A big part of the substantial work Sage developers do is ensuring that many FOSS mathematical packages build on a wide range of computers and can all be easily installed together. That said, Sage does have unique functionality not available anywhere else, which is important for specialist researchers in certain areas (e.g., in number theory and in algebraic combinatorics).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @12:42PM
Just open source your search and advertising code. I mean, you fuckers won't even open source your own android apps.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday November 14 2014, @06:28PM
Exactly this. I'm all for FOSS everything, but Google calling out Wolfram to open source stuff is like the NSA calling out high school student governments for shady election practices.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @09:47PM
Worst . . . analogy . . . ever