Information for Contributors
Although we both admire and respect Richard Stallman and the GNU project, we
believe creative people should find it possible to be rewarded for their
efforts. We hope to achieve many of the advantages of GNU software
while making it possible for you to be rewarded for your software
efforts. If after considering the points below, you have an interest in
contributing software to be sold by Math à la Carte, Email us giving the details.
It may not be important to you, but it is important to us that Math à
la Carte not become beholden to shareholders to maximize profits. Thus
if it is at all possible the control of Math à la Carte will be passed
on to someone with similar views. (We need to generate enough income to
make that a viable possibility. We feel a stronger obligation to insure
this kind of continuity to our customers than to return an absolute maximum of
proceeds to our contributors.)
- Bandwidth is not free. It takes time to administer this
site. Subject to the above we hope to return as much as possible
of the income from your software to you.
- By selling software on our site, you agree not to sell it for less by
some other means. You may still give it away or do anything else you
please with it.
- Payments will be made quarterly to those accounts that have more than
$200 dollars in them and yearly to those accounte with more that $100 in
them.
- We must reach some agreed upon compensation scheme prior to your sending
software. On all new software we attach a lien, that depends on
the amount of time we spend in getting the software into our system.
Any proceeds from your software go to paying off this lien before any
money goes to you. In addition we take some percentage from each
sale. We must also agree on an appropriate price. You
should expect a lien of at least $100 unless we desperately want to have
your software on our site, or the setup is unusually simple. At
the moment we are anticipating about a 15% charge for selling the
software, which among other things covers the cost of credit card
processing. If our administrative and bandwidth costs are lower
than expected the percentage we take will be less. (And if
higher, more, but agreements made in the past will be kept.)
- If you die, royalties from your software will go to a separate fund
maintained by Math à la Carte. These funds will be used to
support something in the mathematical software community. Decisions
will be made by polling people though "mom" or perhaps by some
independent board selected in this manner. Note also that the price of
your software may be reduced because of a perceived lesser value due to
the lack of support.
- You must be open to others extending and/or modifying your
software. The process will work something like this.
- Someone will contact you about the possibility. The two of
you will work out just what is to be done and how compensation for
the revised package will be made.
- Math à la Carte is willing to attempt mediating such
disputes.
- If you can't reach agreement, the person can post their ideas as a
comment on your code, indicating the nature of the disagreement,
which of course you are free to respond to. Others are then
free to enter the fray. At some point Math à la
Carte will decide the issue. Note that you have given up
no rights to your software, only the rights to what we sell on our site.
- You can choose to simply offer your software for sale on our
site. We expect this to be the most popular option as you will
avoid the hassles of the alternative below.
- You can choose to have us provide the first line of support for your
software. In this case we get more fussy.
- Except for what must be very unusual circumstances, only think of
contributing something that has been checked for portability, which
represents the current state of the art, and which if it duplicates
other software supported by Math à la Carte offers something
superior is some easily understood way.
- In addition, if your software is in Fortran 77 and satisfies the
programming conventions on naming, error messages and
documentation, you may choose to have it included in the
MATH77/mathc90 libraries. As a result your software is
likely to get wider distribution and you will get a percentage of
the proceeds from the library sales as reflected by your income
vs. the income of others from the library sales.
- Math à la Carte reserves the right to move your software
from this category to the category where we take no responsibility
for the software if we feel your software is no longer a
preferred alternative due to a more recent contribution.
This and all of our policies are subject to change, based on feedback from you
and others. If you don't like (or do) our policies you can express your
views publicly under the "admin" button in the "mom" area.
Revised: June 11, 2001