It's not really true that those who do research in the academice community are not taken seriously. Maybe those who do research at small collages whose main focus is teaching, but certainly not at the large universities. Researchers there will sometimes get in trouble for spending too much time on their teaching, and not enough in their labs doing research.
I completely agree, however, that the best way to get more open-source software out of researchers is to pay for the research. As a biology graduate student interested in programming and bioinformatics, I seem myself as one of the people who will have to make the choice between academia and free software (and no money, and nasty academic politics) and industry and closed software (and lots of money). It's a tough choice for me, and if someone wants me to make the right one (academia), well, they're going to have to send a decent salary my way. Sorry, but that's how it works.
The tough part of the enforcability issue is that people from all over the world can spam in Colorado, and there's almost never a way to keep track of those people. It's a good start, though.
The Human Genome Project, as run by the NIH and various other non-profit organizations, has the goal of bringing the entire human genome sequence into the public domain. However, the HGP has a serious competitor in Celara. This company is also sequencing the human genome and releasing the data to the public domain, but only after patenting any interesting sequences it finds. I find this abhorrent, as someone who believes that patenting natural genes is ridiculous as well as unethical.
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I completely agree, however, that the best way to get more open-source software out of researchers is to pay for the research. As a biology graduate student interested in programming and bioinformatics, I seem myself as one of the people who will have to make the choice between academia and free software (and no money, and nasty academic politics) and industry and closed software (and lots of money). It's a tough choice for me, and if someone wants me to make the right one (academia), well, they're going to have to send a decent salary my way. Sorry, but that's how it works.
The tough part of the enforcability issue is that people from all over the world can spam in Colorado, and there's almost never a way to keep track of those people. It's a good start, though.
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