Recently I've been involved in transitioning an academic software piece to an open source library. One of the most noticeable things is the different priorities

Recently I've been involved in transitioning an academic software piece to an open source library. One of the most noticeable things is the different priorities and emphasis on what is driving value in these different environments. The people who were making the code before had priorities mostly to do with research, the main artifacts were papers and research, the software itself was not the main artifact. The interesting thing is that they had good software and research skills so it wasn't a matter of bad skills muddying the waters and hence gave a great spotlight into how different people can have different priorities with code. So when we were making it into a library which others could base their work off there was a big shift in priorities because the code became an artifact worthy of directly spending more time/money on. You may find what we wrote about this process interesting as it highlights the things from a software engineering/open source perspective that were now important and had to be done to make the project a standalone library useful for consumption by other developers: https://www.customprogrammingsolutions.com/blog/2018-02-25/Persephone-project/ https://www.customprogrammingsolutions.com/blog/2018-02-25/P...