SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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?