By definition, one would expect that the highest level of intellectuality should be found in the academic world. Nevertheless, so far, there has not been enough contribution from the side of the academies to the Open Source initiative. Apart from the Computer Scientists and a limited number of academy dudes from some specific disciplines, such as numerical analysis and simulation, other scientists seem to be ignoring the Open Source movement or at least not be prepared to join it.
It seems to me that this has to be somehow worked out. I do not see any point in spending such a huge amount of money on proprietary softwares particularly given the limitations the universities and research institutes are facing in securing research and education funds. It is still not to mention the limitations brought by these softwares to the supposedly-wild research environment. The tendency to use commercial codes for the research purpose leads to the sad tragedy that the state-of-the-art research in top research institutes is tied to the pace of development of the proprietary packages. And what is even worse is inability of the well-established quality-assurance mechanisms of the academic world, like peer-review, to evaluate the results of any research conducted by a closed-source code.
One can hardly find any sign of improvement over time. Since 15 to 20 years ago, there has been a drastic boom in exploitation of PCs in the collegiate as well as pre-college education. However, computer literacy of today Average Computer User (ACU) is no better than that of the first generation, I believe. The monopoly of big companies such as Microsoft is one of the reasons. But do not forget about Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs) being around for almost 12 years practically since Windows 95 release. Majority of current ACUs have barely ever used command line.
In the pre-Win95 ages, the usual path of computer training was to start with command line. The natural further steps were batch file writing and finally programming. The path was so smooth and natural that few people bothered to even question it. Today computer training, instead, starts with a few clicks, continues with more clicking, and no surprise the final stage of formal computer education turns out to be yet a bit heavier clicking. Nobody bothers to ask what is really happening behind the scenes.
This is ok as far as the clicking tasks do not have to do with serious supposedly world-class researches. During all these years, as a student, engineer, researcher, instructor, and peer-reviewer, I have seen damn lot of rubbish results coming out of all sorts of commercial packages. Not that the packages are always guilty; the users are, in many cases, no better.
Open source codes are helpful from several viewpoints. First, more than just clicking is normally needed get something out of open source scientific codes. In many cases, the operator has to have some knowledge of the algorithm inside the code. To broaden the working knowledge of the code, the operators (students or junior researchers) can be asked to improve the code. Second, any analysis carried out by open source codes can be evaluated by peers and evaluated by the researchers. Closed-code packages practically work like black boxes. The operator introduces something to the code and something comes out of the software no clue what is happened in the box. This is not a big problem as long as the codes are bug-free but well bugs are proven to be always around. Third, the researchers can improve the research capabilities of the open-source codes and share it with other researchers hence do not limit themselves to the development of the commercial products and at the same time make a ground for further researches by other researchers within the globe. Finally, open-source packages can reduce the costs of research significantly as the proprietary research packages are often very expensive and are accessible by the researchers from developing countries. Open-source not only makes the research cheaper for the researchers in the well-funded institutes, but also makes the same research platform accessible for many other researchers from the developing countries and hence makes the pace of improvement of the research field much faster. This is particularly important for the areas where rapid success of the research is vital, e.g. medical researches.
One of the purposes of this weblog is to promote applications of the open-source codes in the academic world. Of course other aspects of the open source world are dealt with as well.
Filed under: General Tagged: | Academy, Opens Source, Research, University
