For The Love Of Open Source

Jim Madison writes: "Is the open source movement about the joy of hacking? The latest edition of FirstMonday has an interesting academic study that says "No!", it is only natural in our traditional political economy that software be developed with public funding in the safety of academia when the markets are immature. Have moved into a post-scarcity gift culture or is the report correct that open source uses and needs the subsidy of public investment to grow within traditional industrial capitalism?"

Comments

$0.02 from an academic

[s20451]

I agree that academia tends to support open source software, which has several reasons, in my experience. Firstly, academics are accustomed to peer review, and are comfortable with the notion that inspection by an independent expert tends to improve research. Secondly, academics' livelihoods depends directly on the scientific and not the commercial significance of their work. Most academics have an awareness that their salary is paid for by the generosity of government and industry, who (usually) don't expect anything specific in return; this leads to a desire to give something tangible back (such as the software that results from a research project). Finally, it is usually true that the software produced by academics is not important in itself; instead, it is the idea behind the software that academics want to promulgate; releasing the source code is the quickest way to spreading this idea.

Personally, I release my simulation software in the hope that another researcher continuing my work won't have to waste six months writing his/her own software from scratch.