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Comment by oandrei | Hacker News Reader

Academia needs some control mechanisms. Otherwise, the scientific research is at risk of becoming completely chaotic. Selective availability of software is one of those mechanisms. In this case, a closed-source software is made available to a specific group of people controlled by highly competent leaders: the US academic community. This increases the prestige of the group, and indirectly the level of competition needed to get there. Moreover, it increases the prestige of the US universities. This also helps the world-renowned science leaders to have more refined control over the direction of scientific research and science policy.

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One of the guiding principles of the academy is academic freedom, i.e. the freedom to pursue research in a free and protected way. So academics aren't inclined to embrace "control mechanisms".

Prestige is the concentration of high quality research (as judged by peers) in one place.

I fail to see how making only some software available to US academics (which seems to be what you are suggesting), in any way enhances their prestige or capacity to influence science policy.

I wonder if NASA would get more funding from congress if we told them they were only allowed to use SAT-solvers in planning space missions.

But the notion that the Simons foundation is somehow trying to make software "selectively available", rather than just increase the availability of one particular piece of software they like, seems far-fetched to me.

"making only some software available in US" --- you slightly missed my point. I meant "software only available in US". That would be impossible to achieve with Sage, as Sage is open source. If you support Sage, you cannot control who gets it. (By the way, North Korea would also be able to use it!) The point, I believe, is to only support those projects which are under control and can be used for control. Maybe I am unfair to Simons. It is just hard for me to interpret this in any other way. It is not only about software. Academia has other structures serving the same purpose.

Is your original post above meant to be sarcastic? I can't tell. A basic idea in scientific research (especially mathematics) is that we do NOT need "control mechanisms" like you describe that prevent research in order to avoid chaos. Instead, we have peer review, the scientific method, and rigorous proof (in mathematics). Everybody is welcome to try to prove mathematical theorems and do research, and the more widely we make the tools for doing so available, the better. In mathematics, when a group thinks they have solved an interesting problem, they write up the solution, make it available on the internet (e.g., on arxiv.org), and other researchers read it. If the group has correctly and deeply understood the solution to an important problem, then their work becomes more widely known and everybody benefits. I see absolutely no scientific benefit to restricting who has access to mathematical software, mathematics papers, books, etc. And definitely no benefit to making such tools closed source, thus restricting how they can use that software. One of my inspirations for starting Sage was watching a young Manjul Bharghava (who just won a Fields Medal recently, by the way) give a talk in which he explained how his research had been severely frustrated by Magma being closed source, so he couldn't modify it to do what he wanted.

Dear William, thank you for your great work! My post was sarcastic. I completely agree with what you wrote in your comment. But I do believe that my guess about why your proposal was rejected is partially correct.

Sarcasm doesn't work on the Internet. Say what you mean, to avoid needlessly confusing and upsetting your readers.

On the other hand, if by "specific group" you mean the algebraists who happen to use computers in their research, then yes, increasing the availability of Magma may help them to do better research, which may in turn increase their influence within the academy and ultimately their influence on science policy.

The same case could be made for Sagemath of course.

It has control mechanisms. What it doesn't need is precisely what you describe: a self-appointed, self-styled group of "leaders" who followed the wasteful winner-take-all, judgmental, rank and pedigree conscious ethos of their discipline.

Yeah, throughout history all research breakthroughs have come from academia...

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