summary: if you&#x27;re a researcher and spend all your time writing software rather than publishing your research career suffers.<p>I see three solutions:<p>1) Have the universities band to together to fund a software source for research. Something that would hire software developers who would provide tools for researchers who were with member universities. Pay a market salary for those programmers and release everything under a sharing friendly license, both for recognition and to aid in reproducing results in other labs.<p>2) Mandate a single source for all software acquisition through some software consulting company and add riders to all research grants that provide some number of &quot;software supplies&quot; for the team.<p>3) Get rid of the whole publish or perish paradigm and restructure scientific research so that everyone is accorded rank based on the novelty and repeatability of the research done in the lab.