I think there are other motivations involved here. Much of what's called open source these days has commercial aspirations. Often a lot of source code is develo

I think there are other motivations involved here. Much of what's called open source these days has commercial aspirations. Often a lot of source code is developed and then published when it's quite far along, after the sheer volume of it provides barriers to entry. It's not really open source in the sense of leveraging the advantages that collaborative development in a community brings. In academic settings competitive aspects of research likely produce the same sorts of issues, and in compsci there is likely commercial interests involved too. Come up with a clever new NPL technique for semantic searching and the VCs come out of the woodwork. However I agree with the author and commenters that both code and data ought to be available to all, mainly because that's the only way to make progress. Research is hard, very hard, and building on the half-baked ideas, good and bad, is the only way progress is made.