Re: A free copy of Maple or a frre maple webservre

SzH wrote:
On May 12, 1:57 pm, Karen Bindash <KarenBind...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It's hard to imagine how on earth you can verify the results easily on
a closed-source program. You would have far more chance on an open-
source program.


In practice there is little difference. Even if the source code is
accessible, the overwhelming majority of users does not have the
expertise and/or time to read the code and check that the
implementation is correct.

Agreed, but Karen's point about comparing Maple to Sage is very valid. That would give me more confidence than simply using Maple. Vladimir Bondarenko has shown numerous bugs in Maple which don't get fixed.

Vladimir never answered the question from William Stein about whether he had ever used Sage. It would be interesting to know if Vladimir has. It would be good if he could turn his bug-spotting software towards Sage - but hopefully report bugs in a more professional manner than he tends to do with Maple and Mathematica.

I've never used Sage myself, but have been involved on and off for some time in helping porting to Solaris - it's not quite there, but I think will be soon. The developers are quite responsive - more so than I've found with any commercial software.

Microsoft are financially supporting a native port to Windows - I believe at the minute, it needs to be run under Cywin if used on a Windows machine. Personally though, I avoid windows whenever possible, which is 99.99999999% of the time.
.

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