academia contribution to the kernel

[Javier Martinez Canillas]

2011/5/31 João Eduardo Luís <jecluis at gmail.com>:
>
> At the moment, and to my knowledge, in my computer science department there are two on-going MSc thesis focused on Linux, one of them being mine. The thing about having a thesis based on a beast such as Linux, as my supervisor always points out, is that there is a lot of room to mess things up. If you mess it up, and given the thesis has a limited time-frame, you are unable to write (or even publish) any papers. This gets even worse whenever the on-going work is part of a bigger research project, which must deliver some sort of results.
>

You are totally right and I second you. For me the problem is using
the number of papers as a mean to measure the a research quality. As
the lwn.net article says, academia is so concerned in writing papers
that they forgive to solve problems while the industry is so worry in
solving problems that they don't have time to write papers. Using
conferences and journals to share your research results may be good
for other disciplines but in the computer science world we can share
our knowledge through open source software.

> Therefore, most of the academic work I'm acquainted with is fundamentally focused on providing proof-of-concept prototypes. On the field of File Systems there are quite a lot of published papers using Linux as their backbone, but most of the work is focused on providing some sort of research objective, and the implementation is presented as nothing but a PoC sustaining whatever it is that the paper claims. I'm rarely able to find a working implementation, publicly available.
>

The proof-of-concept prototypes, analytical models and simulation
probably made sense in a proprietary world where one didn't have an
operating system to try a different process scheduler for example. Of
course one would not develop a OS just to try something a new
scheduler, but today with the high quality and good modularization of
most well known open source projects (Linux, Apache, Postgresql, etc)
I don't understand why academia doesn't want to use them to try their
ideas. I don't expect to push the code upstream (it costs money) but
that is something that students can do in their free time if they are
allowed to do and develop against these projects.

>
> I'm not sure how it goes outside Portugal, but most projects I'm aware of seldomly care about this. Usually, projects are funded through our National Science and Technology Foundation (with government ties), or by EU funding. To my knowledge, there are no restrictions on which licenses are to be applied to research projects. In my opinion, being publicly financed research, it *should* be open sourced and subject to a public license, if not public domain all the way down. Then again, this is merely my opinion.
>

Same thing here in Spain. Most of the projects funding is made by EU
agencies and government (as far as I know). I hope that in the future
pushing your code upstream can be used as a metric of research
advances. Maybe could even be the goal of the project. I think
academia needs to modernize and embrace open source as a way to share
knowledge, otherwise we will continue publishing micro-improvements
papers that has almost zero impact and are behind high prices walls
(IEEE/ACM). Unless you work in a university the "knowledge" in these
papers are a privilege that no one can afford. In the other hand
making a git clone from an open source repo is free.

I hope that in the future governments and universities understand this
and change the way academia works today. Otherwise I think that
"propietary" academia will have the same fate as proprietary software.

-- 
Javier Martínez Canillas
(+34) 682 39 81 69
PhD Student in High Performance Computing
Computer Architecture and Operating System Department (CAOS)
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Barcelona, Spain