DonationsThis page describes how to donate. Foundation Members OnlyLogin here to edit the contents of this page. Update access to this page is limited to the current members of the Axiom Foundation (see below) If you would like to update this page but you are not a currently a Foundation Member, please contact page@axiom-developer.org Everyone may submit comments in the form at the bottom of the page. Proposal to Create the Axiom FoundationFrom:
Bill Page
Thursday, November 18, 2004 9:48 PM
Here more precisely is what I propose (and I am open to any alternate suggestions on all points):
Comments please. Bill Page. ---------- From: Tim Daly Thursday, November 18, 2004 9:35 PM re: bounties i have no objection to someone setting up a bounty or paypal system on the savannah site. however, i'm unlikely to have anything to do with it except maybe to contribute some cash. money has a way of making the rational into the emotional and experience tells me to avoid it. so my response to the whole bounty issue is "anyone but me". i did discuss support of axiom with the NSF thru grants and the response is "if there is a commercial product in the area then there won't be any grant money". so as long as maple and mathematica exist the NSF won't give grants for axiom research and development. i spoke to NIST about doing the CATS (Computer Algebra Test Suite) but got a lukewarm reception. i ought to construct a grant proposal for the work i've done and plan to do but haven't taken the time yet. i wrote up a request to the Sloan Foundation for support this summer but never got a reply. i'm not even sure they got the request. the only source of funding i'm aware of is that there is a "Jenks Award" of about $1000/year that is given out every year at ISSAC. Dick Jenks (the father of Axiom) left it as part of his will. i don't know what project won the award this year as i wasn't at ISSAC. I nominated Camm for his contributions to axiom, maxima, and ACL2. i'm supported by CAISS at City College of New York since, although they do not make any claims on Axiom, Gilbert Baumslag, my boss encourages me to work on it. We have a new open source lab that has just opened this semester and next semester we're likely to get students, some of whom i'm hoping to lead into development of axiom. re: the current state and list of proposed work see: http://axiom.axiom-developer.org/axiom-website/currentstate.html which is reasonably up to date. t ---------- From: Bob McElrath Friday, November 19, 2004 3:13 AM Sounds great! It is easier to get donations if, eventually, the foundation can be legally established as a 503(c) non-profit or something. 4a. The axiom-developer.org host system How is this currently hosted/funded? Is CUNY hosting? Currently axiom-developer is funded entirely by Tim Daly on his own. The cost is about $60/month. I also have a co-located server sitting far below it's bandwidth allotment, and a 99% idle CPU. I'd be willing to host some resources, if that would be helpful. It's also an alpha/linux, if people want to compile/test Axiom on that arch. I'm flattered to be nominated, but I doubt I'm really qualified. My understanding of Axiom is less than poor. I hope I will be able to improve that in time, but right now I could not identify what is useful for Axiom. Nor have I even decided if my future efforts will be based on Axiom or Maxima. My monetary offer really needs someone else to suggest a project. My QFT ideas are underdeveloped at this point. On the other hand, the person(s) putting up money should of course have a say in what it goes for. My spare-time allotment will be fixing zwiki, fixing latexwiki, integrating axiom/reduce/wiki, then doing some real work with Axiom. Unfortunately I don't have any physics projects on the horizon which would let me dump time into it. So, I'll be useless to Axiom for a while. Cheers, Bob McElrath [Univ. of California at Davis, Department of Physics]? --------- From: Camm Maguire Friday, November 19, 2004 9:23 AM Greetings! Thanks, Bill, as always for your amazing initiative! If the group determines it is useful to have such a foundation, and
you would like me to assist in making decisions regarding the
foundation, I'd be glad to help. Personally, I would not feel
comfortable about accepting funds for axiom work. Its existence is
its own payment, far exceeding in value IMHO any I've been a bit too reticent about my plans re: axiom I think. I've been planning on implementing Zeliberger for axiom and working through the issues in some of the symbolic summation bugs. I'm about halfway through the book, and have just discovered Caruso's paper on his implementation for maxima. This is my intention. I hesitate to speak about it prematurely, as I want to ensure that I can find the time to bring it to successful completion. If there is anything more pressing, or if anyone else is already doing this, please let me know. If my experience with GCL is any guide, improvements of this sort have a high activation energy of thoroughly mastering the internals of the system. Once this is done, many such projects can be completed relatively quickly. Alas, I still have to fully digest the axiom docs, and especially Tim's earlier posts on axiom debugging/tracing facilities. I like maxima, and all, but in truth I think axiom should be more popular. With user-base/mindshare comes a lot of synergy, IMHO. Right now, I think axiom is effectively targeted at too small a class of people -- researchers in mathematical computing. We need to expand this to the general technical user, and then things will take off. Not that it is very representative, but I check these out every so often: --------- From: Martin Rubey Thursday, November 25, 2004 8:29 AM Bill: great! Concerning Camm's thoughts: I think that we cannot oblige anybody to maintain the work he submitted in order to gain a bounty. This would be a heavy burden on the submitter and on the committee as well. Thus I'd propose that a submission is accepted on an "as is" basis, and it should be very clear whether a submission fulfils the requirements or not. I think a good example would be a MS Windows port of axiom: The requirements would be (roughly)
Similarly, a bounty could be awarded for an SBCL port, when axiom compiles. Special awards could be granted for especially good work. In fact, I think there are quite a few tasks where a running thing would already be great: pamphlet support on MathAction, a Windows port, an SBCL or CMUCL port, compiling domains with Aldor, ... this list is very subjective, of course. I think we should advertise the bounties especially at universities in poorer countries, a bounty of 100$ might be quite an award for some people! It would be necessary to have a non-world-editable page where the bounties are advertised. The individual items from the Todo and WishList should link to this page. Since Bill did already set up the infrastructure, here my proposals:
Note that I really have no idea how much work these items represent. I'm pretty sure that theire value is far beyond 200$. These prices might serve as starting values, however. Sidenote: Many great mathematicians set out prices for proofs
of conjectures they had. Best known are probably the prices of Paul Erdös.
These prices ranged from 10 In this spirit, we might set up a second row of bounties, like:
and so on. BTW: How much money can we spend? Martin ------ From: Page, Bill Thursday, November 25, 2004 3:38 PM On Thursday, November 25, 2004 11:14 AM Martin wrote: Another issue: We need to make sure that we fund only projects somebody works on anyway. Martin, thank you for your suggestions on an initial bounty list in your previous email. Bill: is it possible to have a wiki page only members of the "foundation" can edit, but anybody can comment on? I have changed the edit security option of the AxiomFoundation page so that it requires a login with user id and password before being allowed to edit. This is a little awkward in that the user id and password must be set up manually by me. The only alternative would be to setup the AxiomFoundation page under the Axiom Portal instead of MathAction. Axiom Portal has a full user registration procedure and controlled access to specific web pages. But unless anyone has an objection, let's try it the manual way on MathAction for a while. In principle I have no objection to allowing open access since we can always track any changes that are made and reverse them if necessary, but perhaps in this particular case we need to be a little more cautious. In spite of the edit password, users will still be able to submit comments on the contents of the AxiomFoundation page. If you go to the Axiom Foundation page at:http://page.axiom-developer.org/zope/mathaction/AxiomFoundation you will see a section for Foundation Members Only. It contains a link to the edit page which triggers the login prompt. Or if you want, just go to the bottom of the page and fill in the comment form. My plan is to periodically consolidate comments made to AxiomFoundation into concise summaries of the decisions of the Foundation members. :: PS: It seems that we have already at least 100$ to spend! Do you mean Bob McErath?'s "pledge" : Right now I volunteer $100 of my personal funds for Axiom work. (because I'm a single post-doc and don't have a lot of expenses ;) What do people consider to be an important goal that is not already being worked on, that we could reasonably expect someone to pick up? This kind of thing needs a rigorous definition for completion of the bounty, and test-cases accompanying it to ensure correctness. Last time I looked the total donations received today via paypal was $170. Together with Bob's and Tim's contributions that would already amount to $370 and the door has only been open for about 12 hours. It's a start. Paypal generates an email notice for each donation received. I would be happy to include Foundation Member's email addresses on the distribution list for these notices if you wish. One thought I had was that perhaps we should allow another gentler form of donation - a pledge such as Bob McElrath?'s email above. Some users might find this less intrusive because it doesn't immediately involve any new fangled e-money kind of transaction. We could allow potential contributors to submit a promise to make a donation with information on how to contact them at a later time to collect. Here is one other point to consider: Do we want to allow people the option of having there names listed somewhere on the Axiom website as contributors? Finally, has anyone considered the amount of time that they would like to serve as Axiom Foundation Members? I would like to propose that each member plan on serving for at least one year with an option to re-volunteer at the end of each year. But this should be considered a loose commitment, especially during the formative stage of the Foundation. Ideally, there would be some kind of rotation among willing Axiom users and developers with some continuity of membership from year to year. Regards, Bill Page. |
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