Is this possible? Being an engineer, I used to work with some proprietary software to do some science research, and at some times used to do some programing too. All researcher ends ups programing a bit, even if in that ugly FORTRAN 77 from classes… but we all do program at some level.
So. At a certain point how can you trust the results of a closed source, proprietary, software? And what if you have to review someone work and you don’t have the software that person used, because you can’t afford buying a license just for that.
This leads to open source. Open Source would solve this. But this would make the open source companies very poor. How could someone do some money with science open source?
My opinion is that open source companies have to be reliable, and go to their costumers and give them a full set of services and support. That person that has to review that paper could do the job alone, but if he didn’t have the software he probably would have an hill to climb and learn how to work with it. Science software is so specific that it would require a long time on the code. Here support would come in and sell some services.
Other thing people could do to “sell” the open-science is to release the software in 2 versions. One, in single station work, and another with support for multi processing. It’s a fact that todays science require very parallel processing, so this could be a solution.
Someone suggested advertisement as a solution, but I don’t like the idea of having a science software with some kind of popup or banner. It’s to lame for a science software and it would demean the credibility of it.