To follow up on Paul Dubois's wise comments about history, I would cite a more recent example: Software Carpentry. In 1999, with great fanfare, DOE (LANL) and CodeSourcery announced:

The aim of the Software Carpentry project is to create a new generation of easy-to-use software engineering tools, and to document both those tools and the working practices they are meant to support. The Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory is providing $860,000 of funding for Software Carpentry, which is being administered by Code Sourcery, LLC. All of the project's designs, tools, test suites, and documentation will be generally available under the terms of an Open Source license.

With announcements to the scientific community and an article in Dr. Dobb's Journal, this thing looked like a project aimed at development tools quite similar to what you are envisioning for numerical tools, right down to the python-centricity. If you go to the web site (http://www.software-carpentry.com) today, you will find that a year into the project, the plug was pulled. This does not bode well for big open or free projects financed by the major scientific agencies. Curiously the private sector has done much better in this regard (e.g., VTK, spun out of General Electric, Data Explorer from IBM, etc.). At 01:53 AM 12/7/01, Christos Siopis <siopis@umich.edu> wrote:

In essence, what i am 'proposing' is for a big umbrella organization (NSF, NASA and IEEE come to mind) to sponsor the development of this uber-library for numerical scientific and engineering applications. This would be 'sold' as an infrastructure project: creating the essential functionality that is needed in order to build most kinds of scientific and engineering applications. It would save lots of duplication effort and improve productivity and quality at government labs, academia and the private sector alike. The end product would have some sort of open-source license (this can be a thorny issue, but i am sure a mutually satisfactory solution can be found). Alternatively (or in addition), it might be better to specify the API and leave the implementation part (open source and/or commercial) to others.

============================================================================= Jonathan M. Gilligan jonathan.gilligan@vanderbilt.edu The Robert T. Lagemann Assistant Professor www.vanderbilt.edu/lsp/gilligan of Living State Physics Office: 615 343-6252 Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, Box 1807-B Lab (X-Ray) 343-7574 6823 Stevenson Center Fax: 343-7263 Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235 Dep't Office: 322-2828