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But the problem is wider than just not knowing what others are doing. Grant money for writing things tends to encourage everyone to start their own thing, beca

by iguy 6y ago

But the problem is wider than just not knowing what others are doing. Grant money for writing things tends to encourage everyone to start their own thing, because having something you own is a good story to tell, it makes you look like a leader (at least in your reports) in a way that contributing bug-fixes to someone else's project simply doesn't. (In commerce it's the other way around, the guy with many clients can split the cost, and thus give more functionality per dollar, and thus out-compete the little guys.) GP's suggestion of giving end-uses some kind of tickets to distribute to software they use, and then pay its developers, sounds like a smart way to encourage consolidation.

xondono 6y ago
The whole EU grant process it’s a giant mess. I’ve seen job postings for developers where the most important required skill was knowing the grant process and how to write successful proposals (which is an art form itself). This has provided a specially perverse incentive for people that are involved in both academia and politics. I know of a certain emeritus professor that was particularly involved in national politics (spain did not have that many engineers 60 years ago), his engineering skills are average at best, since he has spent his whole life working the politics of academia. That said, he had so many titles and awards that just his qualifications earned the company he created a lot of points towards getting substantial grants. The startup has been getting >1M€/year since 2014 from the EU, plus indirect investment from private firms that can claim special benefits. All money they get they “invest” into getting stuff like patents, that allow them to claim IP with made up value. They actually have a patent for a robot architecture for which there’s no analytic solution to inverse kinematics, meaning that instead of having a trigonometric formula for computing the position of the robot, we had to do an exhaustive search simulating the position of the robot in 3d space until we were close enough.

by iguy 6y ago

xondono 6y ago

The whole EU grant process it’s a giant mess. I’ve seen job postings for developers where the most important required skill was knowing the grant process and how to write successful proposals (which is an art form itself). This has provided a specially perverse incentive for people that are involved in both academia and politics. I know of a certain emeritus professor that was particularly involved in national politics (spain did not have that many engineers 60 years ago), his engineering skills are average at best, since he has spent his whole life working the politics of academia. That said, he had so many titles and awards that just his qualifications earned the company he created a lot of points towards getting substantial grants. The startup has been getting >1M€/year since 2014 from the EU, plus indirect investment from private firms that can claim special benefits. All money they get they “invest” into getting stuff like patents, that allow them to claim IP with made up value. They actually have a patent for a robot architecture for which there’s no analytic solution to inverse kinematics, meaning that instead of having a trigonometric formula for computing the position of the robot, we had to do an exhaustive search simulating the position of the robot in 3d space until we were close enough.