In February of this year (2015), I founded a Delaware C Corporation called "SageMath, Inc.". This is a first stab at the guiding principles for the company. It should help clarify the relationship between the company, the Sage project, and other projects like OpenDreamKit and Jupyter/IPython.
Company mission statement:
Make open source mathematical software ubiquitous.This involves both creating the SageMathCloud website and supporting the development and distribution of the SageMath and other software, including Jupyter, Octave, Scilab, etc. Anything open source.
Company principles:
- Absolutely all company funded software must be open source, under a GPLv3 compatible license. We are a 100% open source company.
- Company independence and self-determination is far more important than money. A core principle is that SMI is not for sale at any price, and will not participate in any partnership (for cost) that would restrict our freedom. This means:
- reject any offers from corp development from big companies to purchase or partner,
- do not take any investment money unless absolutely necessary, and then only from the highest quality investors
- do not take venture capital ever
- Be as open as possible about everything involving the company. What should not be open (since it is dangerous):
- security issues, passwords
- finances (which could attract trolls)
- private user data
- aggregate usage data, e.g., number of users.
- aggregate data that could help other open source projects improve their development, e.g., common problems we observe with Jupyter notebooks should be provided to their team.
- guiding principles
Business model
- SageMathCloud is freemium with the expectation that 2-5% of users pay.
- Target audience: all potential users of cloud-based math-related software.
SageMathCloud mission
Make it as easy as possible to use open source mathematical software in the cloud.This means:
- Minimize onboard friction, so in less than 1 minute, you can create an account and be using Sage or Jupyter or LaTeX. Morever, the UI should be simple and streamlined specifically for the tasks, while still having deep functionality to support expert users. Also, everything persists and can be sorted, searched, used later, etc.
- Minimize support friction, so one click from within SMC leads to a support forum, an easy way for admins to directly help, etc. This is not at all implemented yet. Also, a support marketplace where experts get paid to help non-experts (tutoring, etc.).
- Minimize teaching friction, so everything involving software related to teaching a course is as easy as possible, including managing a list of students, distributing and collecting homework, and automated grading and feedback.
- Minimize pay friction, sign up for a $7 monthly membership, then simple clear pay-as-you-go functionality if you need more power.
