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Academic funding of ongoing projects
Much software developed in an academic context is abandoned and rots away after the project finishes and the students move on. My work is mostly on OMERO which does not easily fit into the standard model. Many research groups and academic institutions find our software very useful. The OMERO system running at work for the School of Life Sciences is a long-lived production system and it has possibly a thousand kin around the world, as well as many lesser deployments. OMERO enables research and collaboration well enough to have independent reviewers judge that the project delivers great value.
OMERO needs work on an ongoing basis. We need to make sure that many people can continue to deploy and use it so as new versions of underlying platforms come out, such as operating systems, language implementations, third-party libraries, we must adjust our software to match. Furthermore, microscopy has been advancing at a high rate for many years, in ways both qualitative and quantitative, and to remain useful OMERO must adapt accordingly. We are always playing catch-up but through ongoing effort we remain close enough. To take a simple example, OMERO uses Bio-Formats to read microscope image files but a new version of the microscope software may write the images in a new format and we sometimes first find this out when users report that OMERO suddenly can't read their images.
However, I am classified as research staff even though I don't do any research. As a professional software team delivering and supporting production code I wonder if we are out of place in the university. Although we strongly serve research funding agencies' ultimate goals, software maintenance is not something that they are inclined to fund; they instead seek an
I wonder how other important pieces of research infrastructure are funded. People seem to agree it's worth doing and that others should indeed fund it.
OMERO needs work on an ongoing basis. We need to make sure that many people can continue to deploy and use it so as new versions of underlying platforms come out, such as operating systems, language implementations, third-party libraries, we must adjust our software to match. Furthermore, microscopy has been advancing at a high rate for many years, in ways both qualitative and quantitative, and to remain useful OMERO must adapt accordingly. We are always playing catch-up but through ongoing effort we remain close enough. To take a simple example, OMERO uses Bio-Formats to read microscope image files but a new version of the microscope software may write the images in a new format and we sometimes first find this out when users report that OMERO suddenly can't read their images.
However, I am classified as research staff even though I don't do any research. As a professional software team delivering and supporting production code I wonder if we are out of place in the university. Although we strongly serve research funding agencies' ultimate goals, software maintenance is not something that they are inclined to fund; they instead seek an
exit strategyand opine that the university itself should fund the more mature projects. Back in the real world, this would have research groups around the world diverting significant effort in recreating poorer facsimiles of OMERO. Possibly the agencies would prefer us to become a commercial entity and to fund us indirectly through researchers' overhead in budgets though I suspect that would rather inhibit generous code contributions to our project from the wider community.
I wonder how other important pieces of research infrastructure are funded. People seem to agree it's worth doing and that others should indeed fund it.
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