From the invite, “In the 60 years since the invention of the digital computer, millions of lines of code have been developed to support scientific research. Although an increasingly important part of almost all research projects, most research software is barely fit for purpose compared to equivalent systems in the commercial world. The code is hard to understand or maintain, lacking documentation and version control, and is continually ‘re-invented’ as the code writers move on to new jobs. This represents a tremendous waste of the already inadequate resources that are put into its development. We will investigate how this situation has come about, why it is important to the future of research, and what can be done about it.”

My thoughts are that there is a lot of confusion as to where ‘value’ lies. Clearly, IBM OS/2 saturated its market, and there is no longer significant value in trying to sell more copies of it; http://www.ecomstation.com/ is a ‘niche market’, no more likely to sell in volume than typewriters and card punches.

So what’s in the future ?