[TOS] Bridging research and implementation in open source

[David Humphrey]

> Just as much as credit towards tenure and promotion are
> very important to faculty members so is research funding.
> In evaluating research funding requests, traditional funding
> agencies often evaluate researchers based on their record of
> publication in refereed journals and conferences.   So even if
> tenure and promotion policies begin to give appropriate
> recognition to open-source contributions, professors may be
> unable to obtain the research funds necessary to support their
> graduate students.   Without the graduate students, the ability
> of professors to sustain an active program of research and
> open-source software contribution may be severely limited.

I think 'divide and conquer' helps with this: if you're doing primary 
research, chances are you're always going to be doing that; and why 
should you do work that will hurt your chances of getting proper 
funding?  Similarly, if I'm focused on applied computing and 
implementation details, I'm mostly likely looking for opportunity in 
this space.  Trying to have either one become the other loses the value 
of what could be done in collaboration: why not tackle the problem 
jointly instead of saying, "I can't do research and get funding if I get 
sidetracked with implementation."

> The second issue is technology transfer.   It has been pointed
> out that some professors are just not concerned about the
> application of their work in industry.    That is true.   But for
> those who do, we should also look at what university-industry
> liaison offices promote.   Those offices generally focus on
> technology development with non-disclosure agreements, patents
> and exclusive licensing deals that can bring revenue into
> the university.   The professor who wants to contribute their
> advances through an open-source business model has little
> support available from the university for doing so.

I've been burned enough in the past by people who claim they are 
interested in funding open source work to know that this is indeed an 
issue.  Having said that, I think we have at least 3 categories here:

* don't care about implementation of research
* interested in seeing research implemented in open source projects
* interested in commercialization of research via open source products

I'm not sure the third one maps easily into what I'm describing, but the 
first and second ones have potential, since there aren't so many risks 
to touching that code/research.

Dave