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I think you're missing the point. The authors of NumPy (and other scientific software) have made it possible for many, many people to do better, faster researc

I think you're missing the point. The authors of NumPy (and other scientific software) have made it possible for many, many people to do better, faster research, and their career trajectory ought to reflect that contribution. Right now, it does not. The NSF will certainly give you money to develop asymptotically faster matrix multiplication algorithms. They are much less interested in funding efforts that save an equal amount of researcher time by writing clearer documentation. Tenure committees would rather see 10 papers or 100 citations than a thousand pull requests, even if the last has a much bigger impact on the state of the entire field. If the authors of NumPy were totally rational, they would have written just enough code and documentation to publish something like "NumPy: A Python library for linear algebra" in the Journal of Statistical Software (or something), then moved on to something else entirely. All the work beyond that (assuming it's not supporting a future paper) comes at the expense of their academic careers. People certainly do it anyway--sometimes out of pride, or a sense of helpfulness--but they're certainly not rewarded for it. They could be though. Funding agencies could give grants for the on-going development and maintenance of software that helps their grantees. Universities could consider contributions to the broader community as part of their hiring and promotion process, and so on. The odd part is that this would probably be more cost-effective too. Even a $10M/5 year grant is just a drop in the bucket compared to what all NIH/NSF/etc grantees pay for Matlab or Prism licenses.

Radim 9y ago
With all due respect, the career trajectory of Travis Oliphant (&co) has been nothing but spectacular! He's extremely accomplished, respected and (I hope) compensated. You're kinda undermining your own point there :-) In any case: "force other people to finance my hobbies" is not my favourite ideology. I find the idea of some "tenure committee" deciding what I should do with my money mildly disgusting. You're very cavalier throwing millions around, but you do realize this is money other people had to earn and tax first, right? And that these people might have preferred to contribute and support a different cause instead, perhaps something closer to their own heart and interests?
- mattkrause 9y ago
  Travis Elephant has done very well with Enthought and Continuum Analytics. Before that though, he was an assistant prof at BYU. He's written several times about how he essentially gave up his academic career to continue working on NumPy. For example, he alludes to it in this post he wrote http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.ca/2012/01/transition-to-continuum.html http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.ca/2012/01/transition-to-... that says "[my wife] watched me sacrifice my tenure-track position by writing NumPy instead of more papers." You agree that NumPy has been a huge boon to the scientific community and that BME (his previous field) has reaped the benefits too, right? Let's say NumPy has made minor (~5%) contributions to, say, 500 papers; this is probably a huge underestimate. If he had instead published (say) 25 papers, he would have a thriving academic career and yet his actual impact on the world would be a lot lower. Academia is really bad at rewarding work that has a broad, diffuse impact. In a better world, administrators and funders would recognize that his work on NumPy was sufficiently valuable that he wouldn't have had to choose. I'm not sure this is the right article to get into "research funding==financing hobbies" debate, but...given that some research is probably going to be funded anyway, wouldn't you rather it be done in an efficient way? Right now, most academic software is a bit of a waste: it's written so that the authors can write a paper about having written it. There's no incentive to produce code that others can use or reuse, no reason to maintain it or update it, and so on. Individual labs can usually figure this out, but that also costs time and money which is coming out of the same budget one way or another.
  - Radim 9y ago
    I like this format. Now that the post slid off the main page, it's more quiet here and we can discuss at leisure :-) Sustainability of open source is a topic close to my interests and line of business. First, I'd question that a "sacrifice" that leads to such spectacular success is really a sacrifice. Perhaps "investment" is a better word? I'll concede there are risks involved, outcome uncertain, stressful days... but that's in line with calling it an investment. These go hand in hand. You simply cannot create anything of value without a struggle, and to think otherwise is to ignore the human nature and the history of pioneering new grounds. In any case, my original point above was that success cannot come without some sort of personal investment. I believe removing risk from potentially high-reward activities is an oxymoron, economic nonsense. Risk and reward are two sides of the same coin. And if the activity is low-reward, it's just a hobby. Masking this risk-reward connection by forcing other people to cover the risk side for you just creates perverse incentives and social aberrations. Think bank bailouts, for an extreme but inevitable example of where this line of reasoning leads to.

Radim 9y ago

With all due respect, the career trajectory of Travis Oliphant (&co) has been nothing but spectacular! He's extremely accomplished, respected and (I hope) compensated. You're kinda undermining your own point there :-) In any case: "force other people to finance my hobbies" is not my favourite ideology. I find the idea of some "tenure committee" deciding what I should do with my money mildly disgusting. You're very cavalier throwing millions around, but you do realize this is money other people had to earn and tax first, right? And that these people might have preferred to contribute and support a different cause instead, perhaps something closer to their own heart and interests?

mattkrause 9y ago
Travis Elephant has done very well with Enthought and Continuum Analytics. Before that though, he was an assistant prof at BYU. He's written several times about how he essentially gave up his academic career to continue working on NumPy. For example, he alludes to it in this post he wrote http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.ca/2012/01/transition-to-continuum.html http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.ca/2012/01/transition-to-... that says "[my wife] watched me sacrifice my tenure-track position by writing NumPy instead of more papers." You agree that NumPy has been a huge boon to the scientific community and that BME (his previous field) has reaped the benefits too, right? Let's say NumPy has made minor (~5%) contributions to, say, 500 papers; this is probably a huge underestimate. If he had instead published (say) 25 papers, he would have a thriving academic career and yet his actual impact on the world would be a lot lower. Academia is really bad at rewarding work that has a broad, diffuse impact. In a better world, administrators and funders would recognize that his work on NumPy was sufficiently valuable that he wouldn't have had to choose. I'm not sure this is the right article to get into "research funding==financing hobbies" debate, but...given that some research is probably going to be funded anyway, wouldn't you rather it be done in an efficient way? Right now, most academic software is a bit of a waste: it's written so that the authors can write a paper about having written it. There's no incentive to produce code that others can use or reuse, no reason to maintain it or update it, and so on. Individual labs can usually figure this out, but that also costs time and money which is coming out of the same budget one way or another.
- Radim 9y ago
  I like this format. Now that the post slid off the main page, it's more quiet here and we can discuss at leisure :-) Sustainability of open source is a topic close to my interests and line of business. First, I'd question that a "sacrifice" that leads to such spectacular success is really a sacrifice. Perhaps "investment" is a better word? I'll concede there are risks involved, outcome uncertain, stressful days... but that's in line with calling it an investment. These go hand in hand. You simply cannot create anything of value without a struggle, and to think otherwise is to ignore the human nature and the history of pioneering new grounds. In any case, my original point above was that success cannot come without some sort of personal investment. I believe removing risk from potentially high-reward activities is an oxymoron, economic nonsense. Risk and reward are two sides of the same coin. And if the activity is low-reward, it's just a hobby. Masking this risk-reward connection by forcing other people to cover the risk side for you just creates perverse incentives and social aberrations. Think bank bailouts, for an extreme but inevitable example of where this line of reasoning leads to.