Re: Major interview

[Erik Walthinsen <omega@cse.ogi.edu>]

On Tue, 7 Sep 1999 bickiia@earlham.edu wrote:

> The motivation for creating a successful open source program seems to
> need to be internal, not based on rewards academic or otherwise.  The
> only other meaningful thing that can be offered is a bit of a community.

Not sure precisely how this fits in, but consider the Masters and PhD
world I'm working in (as a staff programmer, not student).  Here at OGI,
most work is done under grants and contracts, from DARPA or other sources.
The students, as you say, are somewhat incidental, but not really, in the
sense that they typically do their thesis in a field directly related to
the purpose of the grant. 

In such an environment, mature software builds up over the life of the
grant or contract, even as students come and go.  In the right institute
(like OGI <g>), very high-level research goes on and gets translated
directly into software.  In our case, the software is released GPL'd,
since there is no contract keeping us from doing so, and we want the
academic "public" to see our work, not just our papers.

I've seen enough papers with statements along the lines of "I've
implemented this fraction of what we claim to be experts in, and I'm not
going to bother releasing even that, cause I just graduated!" to know that
there are places where this ethic doesn't hold, but there are enough where
it does that massive amounts of software find their way to the outside
world.  Think Berkeley. 

Unfortunately, there is always the issue of who's really paying for the
work.  If DARPA is paying for something to get done, and it precludes ever
releasing software to the public due to time or licensing constraints,
well, it just happens.  Life's tough.

The trick is to find all the gems out there and see what can be done with
them.  In some cases I'd bet there are groups out there with software
that's just begging for a bit of spit&polish, and it'd be the next killer
app.  It's just that these groups just don't have the time or resources to
make it so.

I just happen to have an opprotunity to sort of bridge the gap, with a
project I've been working on at home for a couple months.  A blue-sky
discussion of the goals of our upcoming grant almost exactly described
what I've already implemented or am planning, plus there are a number of
other coincidences that make it likely that you'll be seeing some very
cool reseach come out of OGI in the form of a core GNOME library and
application.  Even if it means I spend most of my non-work hours (of
course I already do) keeping it in a state where the world can use it, I
intend to try to make sure it happens.

The problem, as I mentioned, is that finding someone with the time to get
Reall Cool Stuff(tm) from academia to the Real World(tm) is sometime
rather difficult.

Moral: if you want cool stuff, dig through *.edu and see what you come up
with.  If something looks cool, snag a copy if you can, make it better,
and offer to collaborate with the source to make it useful to the
community at large.  Human-Computer Interface work is something that needs
this right now (i.e. gnome-gui-list), and there are others.

TTYL,
    Omega

         Erik Walthinsen <omega@cse.ogi.edu> - Staff Programmer @ OGI
        Quasar project - http://www.cse.ogi.edu/DISC/projects/quasar/
   Video4Linux Two drivers and stuff - http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~omega/v4l2/
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