On Sunday, September 23, 2018 at 1:18:50 AM UTC-4, rjf wrote: > > I assume that other research universities work about the same as at UC > Berkeley. Anyone can donate money to a professor's research activities > with a designation something like "to support Prof X's research in the > area of ABC". It is monitored by the university, but such "various donors" > funds are typically more flexible than (say) money from a federal > contract, where budget categories like "hardware" and "travel" may > be more rigidly defined. Perhaps the concept here is mostly an > alternative name for > "The various donors fund of Prof William Stein, for research in some field > of mutual interest" >> >> >>> As far as I can tell things have always been used specifically for Sage-specific activities. Now that CoCalc is essentially doing the Sage booth, perhaps it would not be appropriate to use Sage Foundation funds to fund that booth, but in the past that was a very appropriate use (if I understand the nature of the current booth correctly, which I may not). Certainly sponsoring various Sage development activities such as Women in Sage or perhaps others sounds great. I don't know that it is as vague here as "some field of mutual interest".
For reference to newcomers, in the past there was discussion of setting up a "proper" Sage Foundation under US (or other) nonprofit law but William and others looked into the amount of work and/or likelihood of approval and deemed it to be insurmountable. Certainly R and probably other similar mathematical FLOSS does have foundations (even the OEIS!) but I don't know whether they are in different situations. If anyone knows folks from one of these and would be interested in reviving that discussion that would be great, but keep in mind that the accounting issues are a significant administrative burden to *someone*. If we thought donations might significantly increase with a different model that might be worth looking into. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
