Visual Studio Express which is a small version of Visual Studio available for free download, has appeared to be very successful in 2 directions. First, it practically killed all other C and C++ compilers for Windows, as well as decreased number of people using cygwin and mingwin. Second, many people downloaded it and used it for some time at home, have made their companies to buy Professional or Team Suite versions for their work. It started with VS 2005 and continues now with VS 2008.

Why not to try to follow Microsoft in that direction and to produce a small Maple Express version - with libraries on the Maple V level, just with updating linalg to LinearAlgebra and new Statistics package, with only command line and Classic interpreter, without Maplets and without Java, without Optimization and other new packages, only on one platform, Windows, and make it available for free download and other free distribution programs - laptops for Africa etc.

If it worked so great for Visual Studio, it should be good for Maple as well, I think - for similar reasons.

Alec


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