The thing to remember is there's no money in OSS to first approximation - and you don't need money to write OSS. The problem is, you need a lot of money to do science, at least certain kinds of science.
So here is how it works in practice. Say you have an idea on how to make a breakthrough on topic X. You figure you need to pay a research assistant for a year, or buy a week on some instrument, or whatever. Either way, say you need 50K.
Case 1: You are the only person who wants 50K to do X, you need to convince the agency that X needs doing. This is an advantageous situation to you and depends on only you having the X idea, so you become very closed source about it. This is sub-optimal because it delays people looking into X. Also it is a turnoff to the kind of people who are interested in science and not skullduggery.
Case 2. X is in fact a compelling avenue of research, so three people apply to the funding agency for 50K. This is the situation I was describing upthread - now these people have to compete, and prove that they are the best positioned to get an an answer to X if only you give them the 50K. This is suboptimal because by definition 2 out of 3 applicants wasted their time applying for X. Think of the comparison with YC - the startups who get turned down by YC have other options for getting money; moreover they only have the one project they need to worry about getting funded. Whereas a research scientist typically only has one source of money, but many lines of inquiry. This is why scientific seniority often means the death of research time, with people spending large amounts of time on the scatter shot approach - apply to the funding agency for 8-9 projects in the hope that 1-2 will get funded, because if the agency doesn't fund you for something you get to lose your staff and then you are nowhere.
The situation becomes worse if what you need is not 50K but 50M, say to build a new instrument. Now your agency can't afford that at all, so the only way to get the money is to form an inter-agency (typically international) collaboration. Now the real inefficiency nightmare comes in; because what the other agencies buy with their money is the right of their people to work on the project. So not only the project becomes a sprawling nightmare, but the rules typically are than if Timbuktu brings 10M out of 50M to the table, they get to do 20% of the work on building the instrument - quite irrespective of whether they are the most qualified people to be doing so.
As I said, I do not know what the answer is. The reason the situation is like that is an honest attempt by the agencies to be responsible with taxpayer money; the money is not infinite; they have to decide who to give the money to; and they feel, for reasons that are obvious, that competition is the best way to make sure that the money goes to the best person. I don't think anybody working in science would claim the system is perfect, but other workable solutions are not forthcoming.
The thing to remember is there's no money in OSS to first approximation - and you don't need money to write OSS. The problem is, you need a lot of money to do science, at least certain kinds of science.
So here is how it works in practice. Say you have an idea on how to make a breakthrough on topic X. You figure you need to pay a research assistant for a year, or buy a week on some instrument, or whatever. Either way, say you need 50K.
Case 1: You are the only person who wants 50K to do X, you need to convince the agency that X needs doing. This is an advantageous situation to you and depends on only you having the X idea, so you become very closed source about it. This is sub-optimal because it delays people looking into X. Also it is a turnoff to the kind of people who are interested in science and not skullduggery.
Case 2. X is in fact a compelling avenue of research, so three people apply to the funding agency for 50K. This is the situation I was describing upthread - now these people have to compete, and prove that they are the best positioned to get an an answer to X if only you give them the 50K. This is suboptimal because by definition 2 out of 3 applicants wasted their time applying for X. Think of the comparison with YC - the startups who get turned down by YC have other options for getting money; moreover they only have the one project they need to worry about getting funded. Whereas a research scientist typically only has one source of money, but many lines of inquiry. This is why scientific seniority often means the death of research time, with people spending large amounts of time on the scatter shot approach - apply to the funding agency for 8-9 projects in the hope that 1-2 will get funded, because if the agency doesn't fund you for something you get to lose your staff and then you are nowhere.
The situation becomes worse if what you need is not 50K but 50M, say to build a new instrument. Now your agency can't afford that at all, so the only way to get the money is to form an inter-agency (typically international) collaboration. Now the real inefficiency nightmare comes in; because what the other agencies buy with their money is the right of their people to work on the project. So not only the project becomes a sprawling nightmare, but the rules typically are than if Timbuktu brings 10M out of 50M to the table, they get to do 20% of the work on building the instrument - quite irrespective of whether they are the most qualified people to be doing so.
As I said, I do not know what the answer is. The reason the situation is like that is an honest attempt by the agencies to be responsible with taxpayer money; the money is not infinite; they have to decide who to give the money to; and they feel, for reasons that are obvious, that competition is the best way to make sure that the money goes to the best person. I don't think anybody working in science would claim the system is perfect, but other workable solutions are not forthcoming.