[Axiom-developer] Re: proposal to create the Axiom Foundation (was: bounties etc.)

[Martin Rubey]

Hi all,

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)

* that axiom can be compiled according to step by step instructions

* passes "most" of the tests -- there might be some platform specific problems,
  of course, like pathnames and the like

* and the changes are documented.

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:

Windows port                     50$
pamphlet support for MathAction  50$
CMUCL/SBCL port                 100$
Aldor                           200$

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$ (difficult problem) to (I think) 500$ (only for genius)...

In this spirit, we might set up a second row of bounties, like:

implementing Zeilberger 5$
fixing bug http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=10530 5$

and so on.

BTW: How much money can we spend?

Martin