If you are not familiar with Sagemath it is a free open source mathematics package that does simple things like expand algebraic expressions as well as far more complex things (optimisation, graph theory, combinatorics, game theory etc…). Cloud.sagemath is a truly amazing tool not just for Sage bu for scientific computation in general and it’s free. Completely 100% free. In this post I’ll explain why I pay for it.

A while ago, a colleague and I were having a chat about the fact that our site Maple license hadn’t been renewed fast enough (or something similar to that). My colleague was fairly annoyed by this saying something like:

‘We are kind of like professional athletes, if I played soccer at a professional club I would have the best facilities available to me. There would not be a question of me having the best boots.’

Now I don’t think we ever finished this conversation (or at least I don’t really remember what I said) but this is something that’s stayed with me for quite a while.

First of all:

I think there are probably a very large proportion of professional soccer players who do not play at the very top level and so do not enjoy having access to the very best facilities (I certainly wouldn’t consider myself the Ronaldo of mathematics…).

Secondly:

Mathematicians are (in some ways) way cooler than soccer players. We are somewhat like magicians, in the past we have not needed much more than a pencil and some paper to work our craft. Whilst a chemist/physicist/medical research needs a lab and/or other things we can pretty much work just with a whiteboard.

We are basically magicians. We can make something from nothing.

Since moving to open source software for all my research and teaching this is certainly how I’ve felt. Before discovering open source tools I needed to make sure I had the correct licence or otherwise before I could work but this is no longer the case. I just need a very basic computer (I bought a thinkpad for £60 the other day!) and I am just as powerful as I could want to be.

This is even more true with cloud.sagemath. Anyone can use a variety of scientific computing tools for no cost whatsoever (not even a cost associated with the time spent installing software): it just works. I have used this to work on sage source code with students, carry out research and also to deliver presentations: it’s awesome.

So, why do I pay $7 month to use it?

Firstly because it gives me the ability to move some projects to servers that are supposedly more robust. I have no doubt that they are more robust but in all honesty I can’t say I’ve seen problems with the ‘less’ robust servers (150 of my students used them last year and will be doing so again in the Autumn).

The main reason I pay to use cloud.sagemath is because I can afford to.

This was put in very clear terms to me during the organisation of DjangoCon Europe. The principle at Python conferences is that everyone pays to attend. This in turn ensures that funds are available for people who cannot afford to pay to attend.

I am in a lucky enough financial position that for about the price of two fancy cups of coffee a month I can help support an absolutely amazing project that helps everyone and anyone have the same powers a magician does. This helps (although my contribution is obviously a very small part of it) ensure that students and anyone else who cannot afford to help support the project, can use Sage.