[IPython-dev] Some excellent news for IPython: we've received stable funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

[Fernando Perez]

Hi all,

we wanted to give you all some absolutely fantastic news regarding
IPython that we just received...  This also partly explains my silence
during much of this semester, as I was focused on looking for
long-term funding for IPython.

We are proud to announce that we've received funding from the Alfred
P. Sloan foundation (http://sloan.org) that will support IPython
development for the next two years.  Thanks to this $1.15M grant,
Brian Granger and I will be working roughly 3/4 of our time on
IPython, Min Ragan-Kelley will be our lead project engineer, and Paul
Ivanov and Thomas Kluyver will be working as postdocs on the project.
Furthermore,  Matthew Brett and JB Poline of Nipy fame will be working
part-time on the development of notebooks for applied statistics in
collaboration with Jonathan Taylor from Stanford (these materials will
be used by Jonathan in the teaching of his applied stats course, the
STAT 191 course - http://www.stanford.edu/class/stats191).  While
Brian is at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo,  the rest of our team will be
located at Berkeley (with frequent visits to Stanford for the
statistics work with Jonathan).

This will also give us resources to support two annual all-hands
development sprints at Berkeley where I hope all our core developers
will be able to attend, as well as funding for cloud resources so that
we can provide paid support for our CI hosting and nbviewer beyond
what the free plans allow (and further services that may arise over
time).

We'd like to particularly thank Josh Greenberg, our program director
at the Sloan foundation, for the phenomenal guidance and support he
provided during the grant proposal preparation and detailed review
process.

Needless to say, we are extremely excited about these news.  We'll
have more announcements to make over the next few weeks, but now I
need to get a lot of administrative wheels in motion quickly, as the
funding officially starts Jan 1, 2013!

All the best,

f