All too often I hear "how can we justify funds to maintain research software?"
But really, we should be asking "How can we justify _not_ funding it?"
My colleagues and I wrote a thing: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-021-00048-5
@yoyehudi I see a conflict here between two principles: In the past years many scientists managed to break free of proprietary software (matlab as prime example), but the result was that money that went into licensing wasn’t re-allocated to maintaining free software tools, but instead was allocated elsewhere.
This needs to change: Paying for free software solutions needs to become the norm for research institutions.
@yoyehudi very interesting piece.
Gave me some food for thought in my current process of migration/establishment into an UK-based applied uni and creation of a research group on applied software engineering.
@yoyehudi I'm royally pissed off by the fact that researchers are continually made to justify the cost of their work and their own existence even.
Thank you & colleagues for the write up!
@yoyehudi brilliant!
@yoyehudi that’s great — thank you!