I’m in general agreement with most of that, but I suspect that the practice of copylefting will ruin the “customize for Walmart” plan—they won’t object to using an open-source tool, but they will object to the Walmart version being open-source. Also, anecdotally, academia places too low a value on toolmakers, instead preferring the analysts, which makes it a suboptimal way to get ahead—after all, what’s your journal publication history if you spend all your time working on a computer program?
I’m in general agreement with most of that, but I suspect that the practice of copylefting will ruin the “customize for Walmart” plan—they won’t object to using an open-source tool, but they will object to the Walmart version being open-source. Also, anecdotally, academia places too low a value on toolmakers, instead preferring the analysts, which makes it a suboptimal way to get ahead—after all, what’s your journal publication history if you spend all your time working on a computer program?