[Axiom-developer] Re: Literate documentation

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Mon, 14 May 2007, address@hidden wrote:

| Gaby,
| 
| http://www.ggcc.info appears to be a consortium of companies,
| not an open source project in the "axiom" sense. 

Global GCC is a project *within* the ITEA 2 framework (which I pointed to in
an earlier message). 

>From the web site above, you can read:
  
  The GGCC project will last 30 months and is partly funded (around 30%-40%)
  by French, Spanish and Swedish public authorities.


I think 30% is not negligible, when compared to zero :-)

| Sage appears to be a research project at the University of Washington,
| again not an open source project in the "axiom" sense.


    http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/
    SAGE: Free Open Source Mathematics Software 

    http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ack.html

Financial and Infrastructure Support:

    * University of Washington, Department of Mathematics (startup money)
    * University of Washington / NSF, five undergraduates have been funded via
       the NSF VIGRE grant.
    * University of Washington, Dept. of Computer Science, for providing the
        SAGE lab (Sieg Hall 312).
    * University of Washington, Yi Qiang received a Mary Gates Scholarship.
    * The National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0555776.
    * MSRI -- two major workshops
    * IPAM -- hosted and funded SAGE Days 3 

| Both of these projects have a grant-managing offices.


But it remains a fact that NSF (and funding federal agencies) does support
open source (research) projects.  Now, it may be that Axiom, in particular,
has problems getting funds; that is a whole different story that tracing that
federal agencies refusing to put money in mathematical computational open
source projects because there are commercial companies.

[...]

| The point of my post is that open source projects like Axiom, 
| Rosetta, or Doyen cannot be funded under today's machinery as
| stand-alone projects. At least that's the statement of NSF and
| NIST program managers.

I'm not questioning what NSF and NIST program managers said.

I'm just pointing out at some facts and trying to match those with your
statements/conclusions.

-- Gaby