nodalpoint.org - Scientists abandon their software - Comments

for what it's worth...

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 12:10:15 -0500

I never told Jaffe I believed that we needed longer postdocs.
I told him I think we need a better career path for software
dev people in bioinformatics. So I'm in agreement with you.
- Sean Eddy

survival of fittest?

Neil — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 00:40:28 -0500

I think your point about open source repositories is a good one. I download a lot of free stuff, particularly for structural biology, some of which is years old and with virtually no documentation. It's useful to me, but I think if something is seen to be useful, it will survive and be maintained. There's a lot of really good GPL'd stuff around (e.g. Gromacs) and around 350 sourceforge projects under the 'bioinformatics' heading, so good software does have a home to go to. I like the Eddy group's work, but I have to disagree with him that we need longer postdocs purely for software development! What we need is a career structure for postdocs.

No easy solution

PedroBeltrao — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 04:12:13 -0500

Currently the only solutions seem to be spinning off the software into a company or securing a grant to develop upgrades. In Europe at least I think it could be part of a big center like EBI could play. Not only developing and maintaining databases but also software that is used by the community at large. I guess the other possibility is open source development. If the code is useful and visible than I think people would pick it up to develop it and maintain it.

Scientists abandon their software

Neil — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 09:40:23 -0500

Once again I find myself recommending a link from Snowdeal and a link to The Scientist, specifically this article on software maintenance (free registration).

Some really choice quotes here (and as an aside, some confusion over the noun for "one who practices bioinformatics" - they try "bioinformatician" and the surely-misspelt "bioinformatist"):