Okay well, I don't know what field of science you work in, but where I am sitting, we can't make progress without fourier-transforming millions of samples for tens of thousands of detectors three times an hour. Try doing that without software.
Science rests on the ability of others to reproduce and finesse your work. Releasing your code makes this much easier, partly because a lot of code does "boring" stuff like deal with data formats and basic calibrations before it gets to the "interesting" stuff. So giving somebody the "boring" part helps them enormously.
The reason people don't do it: they don't get personal benefit for it, and the journals and funding agencies don't make them. The latter CAN change.
[Edit - also: the way of funding scientific computing is somewhat broken, but that's another story].
> Okay well, I don't know what field of science you work in, but where I am sitting, we can't make progress without fourier-transforming millions of samples for tens of thousands of detectors three times an hour. Try doing that without software.
It's possible - you can make hardware circuit that does exactly this :)
> Science rests on the ability of others to reproduce and finesse your work. Releasing your code makes this much easier, partly because a lot of code does "boring" stuff like deal with data formats and basic calibrations before it gets to the "interesting" stuff. So giving somebody the "boring" part helps them enormously.
What if this "boring" part in others code contains bug ? There's less chance to reproduce it, if you had to write it yourself :)
Okay well, I don't know what field of science you work in, but where I am sitting, we can't make progress without fourier-transforming millions of samples for tens of thousands of detectors three times an hour. Try doing that without software.
Science rests on the ability of others to reproduce and finesse your work. Releasing your code makes this much easier, partly because a lot of code does "boring" stuff like deal with data formats and basic calibrations before it gets to the "interesting" stuff. So giving somebody the "boring" part helps them enormously.
The reason people don't do it: they don't get personal benefit for it, and the journals and funding agencies don't make them. The latter CAN change.
[Edit - also: the way of funding scientific computing is somewhat broken, but that's another story].