I already knew that academia is behind the curve when it comes to IT, from my non-tech part time job at a local university library. For starters, there’s the overreliance on Windows. Then there’s the use of poorly designed proprietary products when perfectly acceptable GPL solutions exist — not to mention the look of scorn and fright coming from the IT people whenever the term “free and open source” is uttered within their hearing.
Although I already knew there was a problem, I didn’t know how deep the problem is until I spoke with GitHub’s Arfon Smith. It seems that academia’s inability to catch up with the twenty-first century even puts careers in jeopardy — especially in the sciences.
In the academic world it’s still “publish or perish,” and being published online usually doesn’t count for much. The tenure committees still pretty much define “publish” as something bound in paper and sent by snail mail.
Arfon Smith is a scientist with a resume longer than both of my arms. This resume includes such bullet points as co-founding Zooniverse and building DNA sequencing pipelines at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. He’s been at GitHub since last October, where he uses his first hand knowledge of the scientific process to help research scientists leverage the organization’s resources. When I spent about an hour on the phone with him a few weeks back, he tried to bring me up to speed on some of the problems with academia, and the reality of scientific research in these postmodern times.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Patches are available to fix the bash vulnerability known as Shellshock, along with three additional security issues recently found in the bash shell. The patches are available for all major Linux distros as well as for Solaris, with the patches being distributed through the various distros.
In a PR piece posted on Tuesday, 
Why is he quitting? Probably because he’s getting old and he can afford to retire; he turned 70 last month. Officially, according to him and the once and future king’s yes-men, it’s all part of carefully laid-out succession plans – meet-the-new-boss, the-king-is-dead and all that.
Now we know he walked and wasn’t pushed.