Ask Slashdot: Successful Software From Academia?

An anonymous reader writes "A lot of masters and PhD theses are about development of software targeting the solution or the automation of a specific problem. Bioinformatics, for example, has a lot of journals about software tools that are coded in academic environments; some of this software is the final result of a four-year PhD. But my question is, how much of this software will see the light outside the universities? I know of some examples, like BSD, but they are an exception, right? Is there any list of successful software created entirely inside universities' labs that became widely used?"

"Widely used" isn't the norm

[93 Escort Wagon]

In this day and age, most good software developed in acadamia tends to get spun into a business venture that makes its academic developers very, very rich. See Google, for example.

Logical Reason for the Dearth

[eldavojohn]

The problem with software in academia is that it is often devoted to a sole purpose. It is not a generalized solution -- conversely -- it's often a demonstration of a solution so specific that it's never been done. Hence the awarding of a title to the creator. On top of that the teams are usually small and time is usually tight. It's also usually a side effect of the greater thing, the thesis. It will always take a backseat to the theory.

When software is widely adopted, it is because it has been widely supported and is a more generalized solution to a problem. If it uses hardware, it supports all kinds. If it reads or writes files, it covers all formats. This leads to widespread adoption but also takes a lot of time and a lot of contributions. If you're also working on your thesis, this is a daunting task to work on the side.

Nobody gets their PhD by making a predecessor's implementation support more file formats or hardware. So this is left to the licensing of the originator and the community -- who are often recognized as the real workhorses that go from prototype to actual usable software. That's why you don't find many PhD projects turned instant open source hit.

In bioinformatics , a relatively young field, most consumers of the software work in a lab and the input is fairly simple. But even with simple input they first had to agree [wikipedia.org] on a format [wikipedia.org] (those are just a few of what used to be many). BLAST [wikipedia.org] and FASTA [wikipedia.org] go back to the 1990s and 1980s respectively ... if it had depended on hardware or the constant change of text files like PDF and DOC, I think you can understand how hard it would be for academia -- let alone the originating researcher(s) -- to maintain and support for the community. An open source effort could pick up that slack but then who deserves credit for that work?

TeX

[WillAdams]

Subject of several theses:

http://www.tug.org/docs/liang/ [tug.org]

http://www.pragma-ade.com/pdftex/thesis.pdf [pragma-ade.com]

https://www.tug.org/docs/plass/plass-thesis.pdf [tug.org]

(John Hobby's on METAPOST http://ect.bell-labs.com/who/hobby/thesis.pdf [bell-labs.com] )

Probably others. More information at

http://www.tug.org/ [tug.org]

and

http://www.latex-project.org/ [latex-project.org]

and

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page [contextgarden.net]

William

Mosiac

[Registered Coward v2]

From Univ of Illinois - it arguably changed the internet from a tool for techies to a new way to do business. One of the problems is if something is really good commercial companies may morph it into products that eclipse the original; but their contribution, when though of as basic research, was invaluable. So the definition of success should not be limited to widely used, popular, or well know; but also include defined a new industry or way of approaching a problem.

Re:Logical Reason for the Dearth

[RecoveredMarketroid]

The problem with software in academia is that it is often devoted to a sole purpose. It is not a generalized solution -- conversely -- it's often a demonstration of a solution so specific that it's never been done.

Absolutely true. And much of the software is nearly unusable by anyone else-- it was built by the researchers to validate their own work, not to be used by others. If you've ever tried to use any code generated by grad students, it is often buggy, brittle, inflexible, indecipherable, etc... (I'm a late-stage PhD student, so I've run into this MANY times...) And that's the code that the researchers saw fit to release to the public-- imagine what the stuff that wasn't released looks like.