[Numpy-discussion] Numerical Mathematics Consortium vs. scipy and numpy

[Joe Harrington]

Currently the NMC membership is tiny.  Likely the linalg focus is due
to the biases of that group.  Getting an open-source project involved
in something like this isn't so terrible, if the vendors allow it
(i.e., if it isn't a sham for one set of vendors to gang up on
another, as the Open Software Foundation was about 15 years ago).  I
notice that Research Systems (IDL) conspicuously isn't on their list
(they'd definitely be more array-oriented).  Also conspicuous by their
absences are prominent groups like NAG and netlib.

As for coming up with the fee, I think that it wouldn't be a huge
investment for STScI and Enthought to split.  If successful, NMC will
impact both organizations quite a bit, so it should be worth it to
them.  Of course, I don't work for either organization so that's easy
for me to say.  Note that these people expect their members to do a
lot of work, so the greater commitment might be time.  However, the
group is conveniently located in Austin...

Alternatively, we could petition for a waiver based on our lack of
profit.  That's been done successfully in the past, too, for example
by the Gutenprint folks (who then proceeded to teach the developers at
Lexmark et al. a thing or two about dithering).  XFree86.org had to
beat on the X Consortium (or whatever they were called then) a bit,
but eventually got in.  I'm not sure what the deal was with fees for
them.

--jh--