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Ask Slashdot: Successful Software From Academia?
An anonymous reader writes "A lot of masters and PhD theses are about development of software targeting the solution or the automation of a specific problem. Bioinformatics, for example, has a lot of journals about software tools that are coded in academic environments; some of this software is the final result of a four-year PhD. But my question is, how much of this software will see the light outside the universities? I know of some examples, like BSD, but they are an exception, right? Is there any list of successful software created entirely inside universities' labs that became widely used?"
The problem with software in academia is that it is often devoted to a sole purpose. It is not a generalized solution -- conversely -- it's often a demonstration of a solution so specific that it's never been done. Hence the awarding of a title to the creator. On top of that the teams are usually small and time is usually tight. It's also usually a side effect of the greater thing, the thesis. It will always take a backseat to the theory.
... if it had depended on hardware or the constant change of text files like PDF and DOC, I think you can understand how hard it would be for academia -- let alone the originating researcher(s) -- to maintain and support for the community. An open source effort could pick up that slack but then who deserves credit for that work?
When software is widely adopted, it is because it has been widely supported and is a more generalized solution to a problem. If it uses hardware, it supports all kinds. If it reads or writes files, it covers all formats. This leads to widespread adoption but also takes a lot of time and a lot of contributions. If you're also working on your thesis, this is a daunting task to work on the side.
Nobody gets their PhD by making a predecessor's implementation support more file formats or hardware. So this is left to the licensing of the originator and the community -- who are often recognized as the real workhorses that go from prototype to actual usable software. That's why you don't find many PhD projects turned instant open source hit.
In bioinformatics , a relatively young field, most consumers of the software work in a lab and the input is fairly simple. But even with simple input they first had to agree on a format (those are just a few of what used to be many). BLAST and FASTA go back to the 1990s and 1980s respectively
My work here is dung.
* Kerberos (Widely used, part of Active Directory)
* X11
* AFS (Andrew File System)
* MACH (Used by GNU HURD and OS X)
And that's just a starting sample.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.