RE: [Axiom-developer] RE: mathaction

[Bill Page]

Martin,

On Saturday, September 11, 2004 8:24 AM you wrote:
> ...
> [Bill Page wrote:]
>> Are there really two *separate* goals here: 1) support
>> Axiom, 2) promote the "Rosetta" ideal of many different
>> systems co-existing and growing and working together?
> 
> We might be very welcome in mupad-combinat circles.
>

What the mupad-combinat people are doing sounds interesting.

  http://mupad-combinat.sourceforge.net/

They even have a wiki!

  http://mupad-combinat.sourceforge.net/Wiki/HomePage.html

The last time I looked at MuPad I was very impressed

  http://research.mupad.de/

And they seem to have continued to develop as a potentially
serious competitor to Maple while moving to a more "Axiom-like"
approach to mathematical content.

But I was rather turned off by their apparent move towards
commercialization rather than an open source philosophy.

Does anyone here have a direct contact with the MuPad Research
Group at Paderborn? If so, I would very much like to seek their
opinion on the possibility of being included in MathAction. I
would be quite willing to invest some time in implementing
the wiki interface for MuPad.

For that matter I am also strongly motivated to implement an
interface for Maple, but currently poorly conceived (in my
opinion) licensing restrictions prevent me from doing this.
Perhaps the situation with MuPad is different?

  http://research.mupad.de/licenses.html

However as far as I can tell from the above, their current
license would not allow us to setup open access over-the-web
to MuPad the way we have now for Axiom and Reduce.

> 
>> ... (big part skipped) ...
>> 
>> Anyway, perhaps making the distinction between Axiom support
>> and the broader Rosetta goals and support for Reduce, etc.
>> is just a matter of the right web site design for MathAction
>> and/or Plone? But MathAction is a wiki and kind of "fluid" by
>> nature...
> 
>  > What do you think?
>  
> I thinking that you are a little to afraid of this sort of 
> freedom. I think that axiom is too small to be a worthy target
> of vandalism, if we become one, we can take measures then.
> I don't see any other possible problems with fluidity. Time
> will tell.

I agree with your views. I wasn't worried about vandalism but
rather about maintaining a productive collaborative spirit
between all of the potential contributors. To me, the content
of this sort of web site is secondary to the main goal of
fostering collaboration. Perhaps there is some (small) risk
of loosing significant content or of malicious use etc.  But
if at least three people are willing to run with this open
door policy (you, me and Tim) then that's ok with me.

Regards,
Bill Page.