Something that everyone should be aware of is that right now we *may* have an opportunity to get significant support. Kodak has acquired RSI, makers of IDL. Most of the planetary astronomy community uses IDL, as do many geophysicists and medical imaging people. Kodak is dramatically raising prices, and has killed support for Mac OS X. The IDL site license just arranged for the group at NASA Ames is over $200k, making site licenses more expensive than individual licenses were just a few years ago, on a per-license basis. At the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting last week, I was frequently approached by colleagues who said, "Joe, what do I do?", and from the more savvy, "Is Python ready yet?" I discussed the possibility of producing an OSS or PD analysis system with a NASA program manager. He sees the money going out of his own programs to Kodak, and is concerned. However, his programs cannot fund such an effort as it is out of his scope. The right program is probably Applied Information Systems Research, but he is checking around NASA HQ to see whether this is the case. He was very positive about the idea. I suspect that a proposal will be more likely to fly this year than next, as there is a sense of concern right now, whereas next year people will already have adjusted. Depending on how my '01 grant proposals turn out, I may be proposing this to NASA in '02. Paul Barrett and I proposed it once before, in 1996 I think, but to the wrong program. Supporting parts of the effort from different sources would be wise. Paul Dubois makes the excellent point that such efforts generally peter out. It would be important to set this up as an OSS project with many contributors, some of whom are paid full-time to design and build the core. Good foundational documents and designs, and community reviews solicited from savvy non-participants, would help ensure that progress continued as sources of funding appeared and disappeared...and that there is enough wider-community support to keep it going until it produces something. NASA's immediate objective will be a complete data-analysis system to replace IDL, in short order, including an IDL-to-python converter program. That shouldn't be hard as IDL is a simple language, and PyDL may have solved much of that problem. So, at this point I'm still assessing what to do and whether/how to do it. Should we put together proposals to the various funding agencies to support SciPy? Should we create something new? What efforts exist in other communities, particularly the numerical analysis community? How much can we rely on savvy users to contribute code, and will that code be any good? My feeling is that there is actually a lot of money available for this, but it will require a few people to give up their jobs and pursue it full-time. And there, as they say, is the rub. --jh--