Wow, this is incredibly informative and nicely even-tempered in tone, for those of us not that familiar with the whole history behind the controversies we see e

Wow, this is incredibly informative and nicely even-tempered in tone, for those of us not that familiar with the whole history behind the controversies we see expressed in various forums regarding the various licenses, ideologies, etc. This bit in particular resonates: > "Developers had another reason to stick together as well: it turned out that the free software world was producing some very high-quality code. In some cases, it was demonstrably technically superior to the nearest non-free alternative; in others, it was at least comparable, and of course it always cost less to acquire — and you didn't have to worry about the manufacturer going out of business. While only a few people might have been motivated to run free software on strictly philosophical grounds, a great many people were happy to run it because it did a better job." This is very inline with academic thinking on distribution of information: put your research in the public domain with your name on it, transparently, so that everyone can replicate it (or not), and that's how you get rid of the chaff as soon as possible. This also leads to academic appointments and a financially secure career... Sounds like an argument for federally funded software development, really, but would Bill Gates still call that 'communism'? There's another connection: open source seems to suffer from lack of investment in UI/UX, and that appears to be because spending a lot of time on that is viewed as drudgery. Similarly, for other academic researchers the Materials and Methods section of a report is often the most important if they're out to replicate the work, but researchers aren't going to hold your hand and walk you through the fundamentals of experimental design and setup, you're expected to learn that on your own. M & M sections of reports are notorious for being terse and requiring insider knowledge to replicate, kind of like using some open source projects is. I wonder if the foundations and such in the open source world would consider just hiring experts in UI/UX, on a contract basis, to clean up their UI/UX to make it easier for non-techie people to adopt opensource platforms?