It might be worth noting that there *is* a large amount of publicly funded software available from universities, government organizations and even corporate contractors paid to develop that code. Frankly, a lot of it is not terribly useful outside the specific niche for which it was developed. (I personally have little use for Fortran weather models)
I would agree that it is repugnant for a researcher to develop something with public funding, patent it and then go on to make a fortune on it... But often (at least in some branches of scence) this is a condition for the research to be undertaken at all.
Having a (small) bit of experiencein this area, one of the most common problems in making publicly funded research available is the combination of packaging and support. I have often found that code is available if you can figure out who to ask and what to ask for! Yes, the public paid $10,000 for a chunk of code relating to enzyme identification, but no one is willing to fund a perpetual $5,000 per year for someone to package, publish and support the software. Further, doing so is NOT part of the mission of the researchers that worked on it. Ask Linus Torvalds or Larry Wall what the investment in tie and effort is to package and support a large package...
All that said, I would dearly love to see a little more ethical and less greedy approach to patents by anyone with public funding. I would also dearly like to see the government do a little better job of tracking and packaging the research/software assets that it has. (Kudos to the many individual researchers who ARE making an effort to share what they or their labs have created!)I still won't care about Fortran weather models, but I would feel better knowing that if I did, I could find out how many the government has developed, and where/how to get them.
Does anyone have any ideas about how the practical issues of publiching "public" code might be dealt with?
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It might be worth noting that there *is* a large amount of publicly funded software available from universities, government organizations and even corporate contractors paid to develop that code. Frankly, a lot of it is not terribly useful outside the specific niche for which it was developed. (I personally have little use for Fortran weather models)
I would agree that it is repugnant for a researcher to develop something with public funding, patent it and then go on to make a fortune on it... But often (at least in some branches of scence) this is a condition for the research to be undertaken at all.
Having a (small) bit of experiencein this area, one of the most common problems in making publicly funded research available is the combination of packaging and support. I have often found that code is available if you can figure out who to ask and what to ask for! Yes, the public paid $10,000 for a chunk of code relating to enzyme identification, but no one is willing to fund a perpetual $5,000 per year for someone to package, publish and support the software. Further, doing so is NOT part of the mission of the researchers that worked on it. Ask Linus Torvalds or Larry Wall what the investment in tie and effort is to package and support a large package...
All that said, I would dearly love to see a little more ethical and less greedy approach to patents by anyone with public funding. I would also dearly like to see the government do a little better job of tracking and packaging the research/software assets that it has. (Kudos to the many individual researchers who ARE making an effort to share what they or their labs have created!)I still won't care about Fortran weather models, but I would feel better knowing that if I did, I could find out how many the government has developed, and where/how to get them.
Does anyone have any ideas about how the practical issues of publiching "public" code might be dealt with?