And just to put it at scale, the engineers of Apollo were so early before our times that they had to code the timestamps in negative.
> And just to put it at scale, the engineers of Apollo were so early before our times that they had to code the timestamps in negative.
I don’t understand how this relates to the scale of open source software or Apollo software engineers. I guess I know the Unix epoch is 01/01/1970, but how does that relate to Apollo and negative timestamps? Those timestamp definitions came after the first several Apollo missions, didn’t they?
Yes, except that largely those projects are tangential to the "real" research. Larry Wall, creator of Perl and other useful things, is a linguist who was "studying linguistics with the intention of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it."[1]. Perl was just a side project.
I'm not certain, but perhaps the parent commenter wasn't being literal. Maybe just a way of saying that the Apollo engineers did their amazing work before what the rest of us consider to be the "beginning of time"?
I took the joke from this comic: https://www.commitstrip.com/2015/10/06/before-timestamp-0/
Or maybe it's a joke. We used to say that some guy has his ID number in roman numerals... or used spears for the matter.
There's so much good open source software that I'm not even annoyed at how wrong your statement really is.
Sadly, yes, you're not wrong. However, have you seen the quality of most proprietary software? No, you haven't, no one has, because it's proprietary.
> Most of it is about people pushing their own agendas and self promoting
Perhaps, but some of it is not, and that is the difference to proprietary software.
That's simply not true.
Academia has a lot of problems, we don't need to start making up new ones.
Universities want money. The #1 concern, by far, of any university technology licensing office is to get those patents working so that they can reap the benefits in terms of huge licensing fees. Literally, no one wants to license anything to anyone who won't develop it.
Also, university licensing offices always have deals where the researchers get the right of first refusal with their own IP.
> Any kind of applied research in the US academic sector these days is best understood as corporate ...
Academics do very little applied research. Overwhelmingly, we do what is called basic research. Finding cool new ideas. Then, we give them to those corporations that do the overwhelming amount of applied research. This is how the system is supposed to work!
> The job description has become indistinguishable from that of in-house corporate researcher
No idea what university you at. But this is totally false for any university I've seen.
> The obvious fix is to eliminate exclusive licensing of academic IP (i.e. repeal the 1980s Bayh-Dole Act)
So.. you want academics to do less impactful research that has fewer applications? Because that's the outcome of denying us the ability to patent our own work.
Yes, but that doesn't prevent them from licensing things to organizations with a lot of money regardless of intent. If there's enough money involved, say a multi-million dollar endowment, the academic administration wouldn't give two shits about whether or not the licensee develops it.
Why in God's name would a corporation with a lot of money pay for a patent they don't want to develop? Wallpaper is a lot cheaper at Home Depot.
Seriously. This doesn't pass the most basic "is this remotely plausible" test.
Anyway, universities tend to give licenses that make them money as the patent is used. There is no world under which they want them to be wasted.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/20/oil-company...
> Reviewers at the Journal of Cryptology didn't understand why they were being asked to read a paper about CPU design, while reviewers at a computer hardware journal didn't understand why they were being asked to read about cryptography.
Why would someone be beholden to these reviewers if their expertise is not adequate or too constrained to review the submission? The author seems to be describing Spectre as well.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1044184/5-mit-pa...
Imagine what could be done if we lifted the majority of the population out of wage slavery with a UBI or similar - how many Newtons, Laplaces, or Fermats are currently toiling in obscurity?
. . . are currently playing the equivalent of Cookie Clicker?
That is, if you don't have the time or energy to take on fulfilling creative projects, you can at least fake the sense of accomplishment with video games.
Any kind of applied research in the US academic sector these days is best understood as corporate R & D for established interests in pharmaceuticals, technology, industrial chemistry, etc. You're certainly not free to do blue-skies renewable energy research (budgets for that are still miniscule at best, and have been since the 1980s), for example. The job description has become indistinguishable from that of in-house corporate researcher - narrowly defined assigned problems are what you get to work on, and 'academic freedom to pursue the research wherever it leads' is a quaint myth.
The obvious fix is to eliminate exclusive licensing of academic IP (i.e. repeal the 1980s Bayh-Dole Act), which would force corporations to spend capital on their own private R & D divisions if the wanted exclusivity, and simply make any university-held patented discovery available to any entrepreneur who wanted to develop it for a small flat fee.
Until then the author is 100% correct about entrepreneurship being the only way out of the trap.