I’ve been wondering about why FOSS is often compared to the academic world, but at least in my limited experience, I see little people that grasp its concept in the world of research. On a quick look, developing FOSS in a research environment would be very good: not only you’d get publicly available results when you publish, but at the same time you can make sure that in an extreme case your application will be carried on by someone else should you not be able to continue development.
At least in the life sciences, it’s hard to see such a mentality. I can understand the publish or perish frenzy, but at the same time, don’t we all remember about published and unmantained software? For me, such an idea would be optimal. Once the paper is out, you can release your software (GPL would be best) and make sure someone will improve or mantain in. Of course you won’t be able to publish for each upgrade you do, but I would generally think of that as a bad policy, one made just to increase the publication count.
Does something like that happen with FOSS in other research areas?
Yesterday I updated The S.T.E.A.L. Saga to Wordpress 2.5.1. I thought the upgrade would be painless, but I was wrong. First of all, the auto plugin updater kind of confused between the various plugins, so it marked some as updateable although they weren’t. Then, some plugins (albeit incompatible), disappeared from the plugin list (the fix was downloading a more recent version).
The biggest issue was, however, the mangling of my .htaccess file due to a wrongly-generated permalink rule that was without a trailing slash (/). Such a badly done .htaccess would cause:
- Problems when loading the pages
- Problems with admin panels (no such page errors and the like)
- Most importantly, it would cause an enormous load on the server (and with shared hosting, it is a problem)
It took me at least 30 minutes to find out what the cause was. Removing .htaccess did not help, I had to remove it then change the permalink to the default value, and then change it again. Now it works, but what a bother for a seemingly “simple” upgrade.
Yesterday I got a few novels that I’ve been waiting for a while: Slayers (the last two volumes published by Tokyopop, as they’re not very good with publishing policies) and Shakugan no Shana 2. I bought the latter as a “final warning” because I’m not very sure I’ll ever continue: the first Shana was written poorly and with a plot that didn’t make much sense (but again, I don’t think the animated version was shining in that respect).
Slayers of course is a different story. I hope someone else steps up and continues the novels, because they’re worth it. Also, according to rumors the upcoming Slayers Revolution will feature an original storyline, but based loosely on the second arc of the novels (which was never seen in animation).
Time to read and report.
A rather large number of days ago I got the first DVD of Ookami to koshinryo, better known as Spice and Wolf, which I talked about previously when the first episode was released. I got the limited edition, which came in with a number of extra features (which still don’t justify its ~ ¥6800 price tag, though). The main one is the inclusion of a 300 piece puzzle, illustrated by the artist who works on the original novels.
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