Code, Community, Company?! Sustaining Open Source Research Software Through Founding a Company

Research software is built with great effort and dedication, but all too often risks fading away once projects end or key contributors transition into other roles. In this talk, we discuss one possible way to address this challenge: founding a company. We will explore under which conditions founding a company can help to ensure long-term maintenance, create reliable structures, and give research software a future beyond short-term funding cycles. At the same time, we want to reflect on tensions resulting from commercial structures, share some of the challenges we faced along the way, and invite discussion about what sustainable models for research software could look like inside and outside academia. Our perspective comes from IndiScale, where we continue to develop the open source toolkit LinkAhead. LinkAhead originated around 15 years ago in the research context under the name CaosDB. In 2019, the core developers founded IndiScale to give the project a sustainable future. Today, LinkAhead is used successfully in a wide range of interdisciplinary research contexts. Learn more about the HiRSE Seminar Series: https://www.helmholtz-hirse.de/series.html