NIH

I find it terribly unfortunate how susceptible academics are to Not Invented Here syndrome. Especially in disciplines like computer science where one of the primary acts of research is the creation of artifacts, a great amount of time and money are wasted replicating free publicly available programs. Worse than the effort wasted constructing the initial artifact is the continuous supply of effort it takes to maintain and debug these copies of the original. It's no wonder that so much of academic software is unreliable, unmaintained, and usable only by the developing team.

It's reasons like this why I support the free/open-source development model, demonstrated in academic projects like Joshua and GHC. The strong infusion of real-world software engineering methodologies that come from designing reliable software in F/OSS and industry seems to be the only way to save academia from itself.