inconsistent condition numbers from cond, det, inv functions

[John W. Eaton]

On  8-Feb-2008, David Bateman wrote:

| If possible, though it really isn't now, I'd be all for stripping all
| individual authorship and copyright from individual file in Octave
| (John's included) and state in the manual that the contributors hold
| joint copyright to all of Octave, and then this would no longer be an issue.

I'm not opposed to a change like this.  Believe it or not, it has
occurred to me that as we have more people making significant and
sizeable contributions, it makes less sense for the startup message to
have my name only.  Recently I added "and others" though that still
doesn't seem quite right.

I don't see that there should be a problem to changing the copyright
to be inclusive of all contributors (no contributor loses a copyright
claim on any file where they were originally listed, though now others
also have a claim).  In any case, given that the code is distrubted
under the temrs of GPL and written by many people, it seems to me that
we essentially have this situation now anyway.  For example, my
understanding is we can't change the license or even add an exception
clause in addition to the terms of the GPL without agreement from all
copyright holders.  Of course, I'm not a lawyer, so this could all be
complete nonsense from a legal point of view.

One practical problem would be how to legally state that all the
contributors hold the copyright.  I know that the R group made a
change like this at some point, and R now starts with a message that
says 

  Copyright (C) YYYY The R Foundation for Statistical Computing

As I understand it, The R Foundation for Statistical Computing is an
actual legal entity of some sort, not just a name they made up.  You
can find their charter here: http://www.r-project.org/foundation .

jwe