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* web: http://ondrej.certik.cz/

I live in Prague, the Czech Republic and I started SymPy in 2006 (based on my code from 2005) because I wanted to try to write
a simple CAS in pure Python, to get the design right first and only then try to rewrite it in something faster.
Fortunately I was joined by many other very good developers and contributors and I think we made a quite a good team
over the past year.

I want to get as much people as possible to get involved with SymPy and to become developers. The development is open
for everyone, all decisions are made on the mailinglist or issues by reaching a consensus. I try to
distinguish my two roles, Ondřej as a developer, and Ondřej, as the project leader. As a developer, I have
opinions and other SymPy developers have opinions too, sometimes we agree, sometimes we don't. As a leader,
the only thing I try to do is to moderate the discussion and push it forward to arrive at some conclusion.
I believe that's the only thing the project leader should do - to make sure things don't stall, that emails
are not unanswered, patches not forgotten, discussions always arriving to the conclusion (either a consensus,
or a clear, pointed out disagreement, with valid reasons on both sides). All decisions (both technical and social)
should be made democratically and that's the only thing I care about as a leader. 

So far this model worked very well, but in the future if the need arises, we may try to make the rules of our interaction more formal and written down (like who is a developer, who is a contributor, how exactly the decisions are made, etc, etc.). 

The aim of SymPy is to create a really usable opensource CAS Python library and I think we will succeed. 
It will stay as pure Python, because that is extremely portable, and it is possible to made it fast too.
Optionally, there could be C modules for speeding it up even more (I don't see any reasons why we couldn't be 
as fast as any other CAS), but by default we'll stay pure Python.

There is still a lot of work until SymPy becomes a general CAS system, but for many purposes and people, it can
do the job right now already.