Don’t fund Software that doesn’t exist

This resource first appeared in issue #1 on 10 Jan 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Software Development, Strategy: Funding

This blog post by Andraeas Müller connects two facts that I think most of us in R&D computing are pretty familiar with - one that we talk a lot about and one that we don’t - and extrapolates to a conclusion that I’m not sure I agree with but is certainly worth discussing.

The fact that we talk about regularly is that ongoing maintenance of important research software (and key open-source software in general) is famously underfunded, and this blog post points to some really useful references on this topic that I hadn’t seen before. The fact we don’t is that when grants are available they are often for new software development efforts, and a huge fraction of those result in packages that are almost instantly abandoned when the grant ends.

The argument (which I’m not sure even the author agrees with 100%) is that funding shouldn’t be extended to packages that don’t exist, as it suggests a need so small that no one has “scratched their own itch” to even put together a prototype; and that once such a prototype exists, if it’s any good at all it’ll start attracting other users. This would suggest basically holding off on stand-alone research software development funding until it was roughly half-way through a “R&D software maturity ladder” I wrote about once (shameless plug).

I think there probably is a place for seed funding to get a project started - not every type of R&D software effort is the sort of thing that someone be meaningfully prototyped by a single person meeting their own needs - but we know that R&D software funding needs to change, and we should take this argument seriously as we change it.