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

[Jonathan King]

And we have a *winner*! (See below.)

On Fri, 5 Mar 1999, Andy Adler wrote:

> On Fri, 5 Mar 1999, heberf wrote:
>
> > Here is a question for JWE.  Many of us have some amout of control 
> > over how research money is spent in our department or company.   
> > But before we can write a check we need something to tell the account 
> > payable people.  How do you recommend we do that?    [text snipped]
> > If you had a bill you could send me for support I could send $X your way.
> 
> This is a very good suggestion. At my company we use free software much
> more than stuff we often shell out $1000 for. Octave is high on the list
> of most used software (after linux, and vim). I could easily sign a PO
> for $500-$1000 for software or support (more than that and I'd have to go
> through more effort)

This has to be the right idea.  It would be really easy for me to send in
$500 this way, and I could convince other collaborators of mine to do
likewise.  Now, the one trick here is that JWE on the other end would have
to be "set up" correctly to do this, and I don't know if that's easy or
not.  If it's *not* easy, would it be possible to achieve a similar effect
by passing money through an appropriate and pre-existing shell company?
(I'm thinking FSF here, but I don't know their policies on stuff like
this.)  This isn't to say that that other or larger contributions couldn't
be handled differently, but $500 for Octave would get lost in the noise at
a lot of places, and would be easy to pull off it it were, well, easy to
pull off.

Come to think of it, a similar shell game might also be a reasonable way
to handle the smaller contributions traffic: in return for $50 (or
whatever) you get a ring bound (I mean the Kinko's special) version of the
Octave manual (whose cost to print and bind this way should be fairly
low).

jking