Re: speeding up Octave development (was: Re: m-code)

[Daniel Heiserer]

Hi,

> 
> If I had an address in hand right now that I could send money to to
> support Octave development, I'd reach into my pocket and do it.  I mean,
> I've shelled out $40-something for Red Hat in January, and I sent $36 to
> the Perl Journal at the end of February.  I don't have infinite petty cash
> in my budget, but March is looking good enough that I can help feed my
> Octave habit.  $50 is a nice round figure; where should I send it?
> 
> I know that's not a lot, but I can probably do it again reasonably soon,
> and if everybody on the list (who isn't a starving grad student) did it,
> I expect the total amount would be meaningful.

I would pay the same, but I don't know if we can finance some experts
by collecting money? 
How many people are in the list.
n*$50=??? 

???/n=

> It struck me recently that Octave doesn't get *nearly* the press it
> deserves in the free software world.  At the Linux World Expo last
> week, Slashdot reported that the "show favorite" in the category of
> Science and Engineering was...
> 
> VA Research

what is that?

> 
> Whee!  Withouth knowing more, I'd guess this was because they had a
> Beowulf cluster up or something.  I don't know if the FSF people at
> the show even had Octave running in their booth or not.  In my experience,
> lots of people who *should* know that Octave exists in fact do not.  It's
> a serious program.

There are many intersting features Octave could step into, but currently
there
are some key things missing to attract enough human resource to be THE
scientifc platform:
o       gui
o       OGL plotting+viewing
o       sparse matrices for FEM and other things
....
well that is what I miss.


bye daniel