If you take a look at the list of trending repositories on GitHub, you’ll see amazing code from programmers who live around the world and efforts for firms big and small. But one thing you don’t often see is work that comes from the university labs. It’s rare for the next big thing to escape from an academic computer science department and capture the attention of the world.
That’s not a knock on university research. But competing with open source projects that enjoy broad support across the industry and around the world is challenging for a handful of academics and grad students. Sure, many of the top computer science schools are well off, but that doesn’t mean the money is pouring into research. Open source programmers, on the other hand, can usually build better code faster, often because their have bosses who pay them to build something that will pay off next quarter, not next century.
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