Re: [Axiom-developer] Why did Axiom fail in the 1990s?

[William Sit]

My emphasis was to have more *USERS* and the question is 
why many former users abandoned Axiom and did not return. 
To clarify, "users" includes people who use Axiom to 
compute and/or contribute new algebra code with 
documentation (who may also be, but not exclusively, 
build-developers or system-developers: people who 
contribute to make, lisp, boot, user-interface, compilers, 
interpreters, packaging, etc.).



William

On Sun, 1 Jul 2007 15:43:53 -0500
 address@hidden wrote:
> There is a constant drumbeat to expand the number of 
> developers.
> To quote Chris DiDona, Danese Cooper, and Mark Stone 
> (Open Sources 2.0
> ISBN 0-596-00802-3, pXXVIII):
>   
>   Brooks' Law appears to set a fundamental limit on the 
> optimal
>   size of programming teams -- and a rather small limit 
> at that.
>   Empirical evidence supports Brooks's Law. For example, 
> since
>   its inception SourceForge.net has maintained very 
> close to a
>   10:1 ratio of registered users to registered projects, 
> suggesting
>   that open source development projects seldom have more 
> than
>   10 active developers.
>
> Tim
>
>
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William Sit, 
Professor of Mathematics, City College of New York 
                
Office: R6/202C Tel: 212-650-5179, Fax: 212-862-0004
Home Page: http://scisun.sci.ccny.cuny.edu/~wyscc/