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From: "Tim Davis" <davis@cise.ufl.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.matlab
Subject: Re: why do you contribute to File Exchange?
Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2007 16:10:44 +0000 (UTC)
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"Bjorn Gustavsson" <bjonr@irf.se> wrote in message ...

A very good question.  There are many reasons.  Some are
very selfless, while others give me indirect benefit, and
some give me direct benefit.

I'm an academic.  Like all academics, I get paid to create
new knowledge (research) and then pass that knowledge onto
others (teaching students, publishing papers, etc).  No one
actually looks to see how many codes I post at the file
exchange and then correlates that back into, say, my
performance evaluation, but part of my annual performance
evaluation is related to how much impact my work is having
on the field as a whole.  So there is an intangible reward
for me to post codes.

Writing a sparse matrix code is not for the faint-at-heart;
unlike some areas of research, I can't just publish the
pseudo-code in a journal article and expect others to
implement the code themselves (~50k lines of code just to do
sparse LU is a bit daunting).  So to "pass that knowledge"
on to others, I write the code myself and it becomes part of
my "publication" list.  Most of my File Exchange codes also
appear as published algorithms of the ACM, for which I do
get a direct benefit from via my annual performance
evaluation (more impact, more papers, more research = higher
raises, promotions, etc).  So you can already get my code
from the ACM - it's a simple matter to also make the code
available at the File Exchange.

My salary comes from taxes paid in Florida, and from federal
taxes (via grant funds).  So it seems reasonable to pass the
fruits of my labor back to the people who paid for it.