I&#x27;m torn. On the one hand I think it is wonderful that scientific software becomes open source, for the sake of human knowledge. On the other hand, I know that it is very difficult to make money with scientific software.<p>So this makes me wonder: shouldn&#x27;t creators of such open source programs be paid like scientific researchers, e.g., through scientific funding?<p>Sometimes I feel that the work of a scientific programmer is not valued as much as the work of a researcher (who churns out papers instead of code). While on the other hand, everybody thinks it is immensely important that code is open source.<p>So it is kind of a lose-lose situation for the programmer.