Re how universities can use julia for teaching. I think here on campus at UC Berkeley I don’t see anyone paying a per user fee for a course, so I think in practice this would just mean that we wouldn’t use Julia Box for teaching. There is already infrastructure in place on campus that runs a jupyter hub for teaching, and I think the natural way then would be to just make sure julia works on that infrastructure. If that works, it would be an entirely fine solution from my point of view.

I’ve also taught a couple of random classes over the years at workshops, conferences, other universities etc. about julia. Those were really advocacy exercises for julia. It is less clear to me how I could do that without some option for users to quickly run code during a class. Asking them to pay for that wouldn’t be an option (these were all situations where the audience had essentially zero interest in julia and I tried to convince them that it is great), I wouldn’t want to pay for it either, given that there isn’t really any gain for me from doing these kinds of things… So not sure… Maybe there could be a small grant program where one could informally apply and say: I’m going to teach a course in the week of X that will have Y users, and the course is advocating julia, and then one could get Y vouchers for julia box that work for that one week, or something like that? There would obviously still be a cost associated with that, but I would expect it to be much, much lower, and it very much strikes me as a pretty effective marketing expenditure for julia box itself.