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Those Who Can...Those Who Can...Posted Oct 23, 2004 11:53 UTC (Sat) by copsewood (subscriber, #199)In reply to: Those Who Can... by Prototerm Parent article: Why open source is unsustainable (Financial Times)
Interestingly enough, as an academic who spent many years previously working as an engineer in industry, one of the main incentives to study, improve and publish source code is academic. The added value we contribute to society in return for our modest but secure salaries is a combination of what we teach our students and how we develop knowledge. What is the point of developing knowledge unless you publish it ? I have noticed very many significant contributions to Free Software made as a consequence of academic research.
Once a program develops to the point where it becomes commercially interesting, then it is the interests of those who base their commerce on particular programs to continue to develop and maintain these, and share the cost of doing so with other developer-users. However, academic interest is likely to be significant in taking a program to the point where it has commercial usefulness. It is no accident that the early Linux kernel was an entirely academic project.
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