No code needed

No code needed

Posted May 21, 2012 15:55 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)
In reply to: No code needed by southey
Parent article: A scientific basis for Open Source Software

The problems you're describing have everything to do with the sustainability of an activity, which in this case is about a piece of research that is supposed to inform further research. If the level of engineering is more or less "it works for me", both in the environment that produced some work and in any environment that wishes to build on it, then the code is likely to be no more than a curiosity, particularly if all people are going to do is just run it and get it to do something before it crashes.

Finally, there is one of the most important components, competitive edge. Grant money is essential and I am NOT going to help someone using my code beat me to the same grant!

And this is precisely why the sustainability situation is so hopeless. It's all "We got our result, on to the next publication!" and just hope that somebody else absorbs the cost of picking up any pieces worth keeping.

Meanwhile, as I write this, an academic somewhere on the planet is probably seeing open source for the first time and wondering if it's an extraterrestrial artifact: "What? They do sharing like this? How wonderful/perverse!"

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