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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I'm torn. On the one hand I think it is wonderful that scientific software becomes open source, for the sake of human knowledge. On the other hand, I know that it is very difficult to make money with scientific software.

So this makes me wonder: shouldn't creators of such open source programs be paid like scientific researchers, e.g., through scientific funding?

Sometimes I feel that the work of a scientific programmer is not valued as much as the work of a researcher (who churns out papers instead of code). While on the other hand, everybody thinks it is immensely important that code is open source.

So it is kind of a lose-lose situation for the programmer.

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In this case one of the programmers is a researcher. That has applied for grants to work on Sage. Grants that also funded other programmers (grad students and the like).

http://wstein.org/grants/

Also noteworthy is the status of those grant applications. All of them from 2013 onwards are "denied". One wonders.

Hmm. If I were an employee at Mathworks, I'm not sure how happy I'd be about my taxes being used to fund putting me out of work. Nor is doing that, what a researcher should be working on.

But the only programmers that have a right to exist are web developers working on SaaS applications, claiming that they own "their" whole stack (BSD, written by other people) and hiding behind "safe harbor" clauses for large scale copyright infringement!

Quite. I knew it would be an unpopular sentiment here. But I got karma to burn :-)

About 0.001% of voting-eligible US citizens work at Mathworks. The other 99.999% of voters potentially benefit from government funding for open source competitors to Mathworks products. In fact, Mathworks itself has benefited enormously from government-funded open source software.

As a commercial software programmer I'd be happy if open source (with MIT/BSD etc non-GPL licensing) solved the issues that take me the longest time to solve. I could then apply even more levarage in providing more end user value.

Professional software is not like beer or cars, it's about providing the end user tools which maximizes their professional output.

Why is what someone working at some company thinks relevant? Should society also not fund academics to work on drugs because it might make a research scientist at Pfizer sad?

They do different things, basic research vs commercial.

I would imagine (although I have no data to back this up), that the majority of contributors to open-source scientific programs are scientific researchers themselves. They are building tools to scratch their own itch. Hence it is win-win for them to build tools that contribute to their own research.

Researchers are paid to churn out papers, working under publication pressure. As you can imagine, the result is not the best, most user-friendly software.

(Making software is difficult. Adding publication pressure is not going to help the process.)

So, there is a second class of people, called scientific programmers, who might do what you imagined. However, their work is undervalued. For example, although they are often listed as authors of scientific papers, they will almost never be first author. And this type of people will also be the first to disappear if funding dries up. Further, when writing scientific proposals, nobody thinks about hiring a scientific programmer, or it comes as an afterthought.

There are efforts under way to improve the standing of scientific programmers, for instance the UK initiative described in this post: http://software-carpentry.org/blog/2015/06/what-is-a-researc... .

There are now fellowships in the UK specifically aimed at scientific programmers: https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/funding/calls/rsefellowships/ . Even so, currently there no real career path for scientific programmers. Hopefully this will change in the future!

For the category of people you describe, I agree this has been the case in the past, and perhaps even the case at present.

I think (or perhaps hope) the future may hold something different though. There are some industries such as bionformatics where the boundaries between science and scientific computing are being blurred. Whatsmore, I think this blurring of lines between science and computing will continue as a generally trend. Steven Wolfram (Mathematica's creator) articulated this, albeit poorly and hubristically in a "New Kind of Science". That work gained rightful criticism from the majority of the scientific community, but it did articulate a clear trend - scientific research and computation are becoming increasingly intertwined.

We may not differentiate so sharply between the types of work you describe in future, and perhaps value scientific programming more.

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