I've worked as a programmer on bioinformatics projects in academia for the last 15 years. Everything has been open source.

Academia doesn't pay as well as the Real World but there are many benefits. As well as being able to work on open source software, the work is usually interesting. Job security has been excellent and I've moved jobs when I've wanted to (5 jobs in 15 years). Everywhere I've worked has had plenty of vacation days, sick days and a good pension plan.

The most useful benefit to me at the moment is flexibility: I mostly work remotely and I choose my hours.

Many bioinformatics jobs don't require prior experience of the field. I started with a computer science degree and no knowledge of biology and learnt the rest on the job.

For example, d3.js is open source, but the code for PageRank and its related search engine is not. When I was a grad students, I worked on projects funded by NSF and DARPA where the code and data were not released. So it totally depends.

Some professors and grad students care more about releasing software into the public, while others don't care or don't bother writing reliable code.

I'm looking for a topic for a masters thesis/possible job?