I am constantly frustrated that the EU or whoever is so kind as to sponsor research activities does not force the respective institutes to open up the underlying program code of whatever prototypes or tests were developed/conducted as part of their funding obligations.

Rigorous empirical/behavioral research is fine and gay, but the more practical advances in our field require an enormous amount of coding hours. So while I am able to read quite interesting and clever papers on previous research activities the most basic of wheels regarding prototype development have to be reinvented over and over. Even if scientific publications actually reveal the core algorithms used in a  modern (rich) client prototype the complexity of such applications makes rebuilding that piece of software (which is often necessary to actually "go further") far beyond trivial.

Add the fact that quite a bit of the baseline research in IS is performed in a small-group or even individual-closed-closet type of environment and also that those individuals have their own agenda of not spending 12 years on a ph.d. and you end up with an auto-selected choice of individual research scope which is accomplishable using existing open-source libraries/platforms (and therefore far smaller than desirable). This leads to the question of who is helping whom here - shouldn't the open source community benefit from publicly tax-funded research instead of vice versa?

I wont even get started about hype-topics appearing in blogs 1 year before they do in Gartner Hypecycles and 2 years before they do on research conferences, but please please - allow us dwarves to step on the shoulders of other dwarves to accomplish more gigantic tasks.

edit: this rant was kind of spawned by my frustration that  Microsoft Research lets their activity logger  PersonalVibe2 (which they kindly provided - in a compiled form - to the public) rot unusable in Win7/64bit systems even if only a modification of supposedly 5 minutes would be required to make it work again. Of course as a private company MS is free do as they wish and not the real target of the above paragraphs. Still: facepalm.