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Comment by mariushn | Hacker News Reader

Excellent point. I cannot afford providing funding, but I can fund myself for 3 years to work on useful software.

> the software I wrote has enabled quite a few projects which otherwise would have not been possible or taken much longer

What's the common practice with such software? Is that published somewhere, open sourced? Or kept private in hopes of being monetized, with IP owned by the author/university?

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At the moment it's "available within collaborations". My former supervisor has had some bad experiences with people using his open-sourced software without acknowledgement etc., which is of course not quite ideal if you actually want to build a career in academia for yourself. Monetisation is not really an option.

My toolkit is maybe a bit non-standard in that it has attracted a few external collaborators using it as well and I like to think I have taken better care of upholding coding standards, documentation etc.

Normally software in my field is kept within a group and dies after one or two PhD students have left.

This is a very sad state of affairs, therefore I would like to bring your attention to a petition towards open sourcing all scientific (and generally tax-paid) software:

https://publiccode.eu

This is a great initiative.It should not be limited to software: research papers, databases and many other things that are currently either not available at all or are behind pay walls should be released.

For research papers, there's also this open access initiative which is gaining support: https://www.coalition-s.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S

Does this call for avionics software for the F-22 (and similar taxpayer funded software) to be open sourced?

There should be definitely some exceptions from this legislation as usually.

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