The canary is already dead

Last week there were a few articles discussing how the economy has effected the present and possibly future of Open Source. Today, The Silicon Valley Reporter has an article about Bioinformaticists being pushed to publish their code publicly since peer and public review theoretically tends to spur greater scrutiny. Sadly, it is being met with less enthusiasm now that Universities, like so many other educational institutions left in the shadow of the budget for bombs/defense, have sold their research to paying companies since research costs money. This is much like the present moaning about Microsoft after more than a decade of people continuing to purchase and deploy their products...the canary is long since dead.

Universities needed money to fund research and companies stepped in so now many major research centers are little more than extensions of corporate R&D departments and this has been going on for the last 20 years....so why is this just becoming a problem now? I remember working at Monsanto in the Frankenfood division when they were still collaborating with a few university labs and even a botanical garden and they regarded all of the research information as top secret. I was even escorted between buildings carrying FDA information just so they could be sure I wouldn't photocopy anything along the way. It didn't surprise me since I would get searched both on my way into the building and on my way out of the building but it certainly was uncomfortable and odd since I was used to the publish early and often mentality of scientific research.

I suppose the question to pose at this point is not the morality of closed vs. open source but whether or not either method has discernable benefits. For all of its fanfare in the last 5 years, has the 'open source revolution' really made vast improvements in computing or has it just popularised the same-old same-old? Has the privatization of academic scientific research really hindered the advance of technology amongst those who are equipped and able to advance it?

There is a lot of yammering on about IP and copyright these days which makes it difficult to find the critical issues and ponder whether or not the need for people to make money to feed themselves depends on copyright and if that is really the issue anyway. I suspect that Ego is a large part of the issue as well since it's not practical to build a pyramid in these modern times so one must find some way to make sure their mark is left behind for posterity ...and this is especially more tenuous as we become more digital where things are transient and disappear in years rather than centuries.