When I recently interviewed DocWolle about his work on open-source Android, one thing became immediately clear: some of the most interesting developers aren't working inside giant companies or chasing millions of downloads. They're building software because they genuinely want to solve problems, share their work with others,
Hmm, I hadn’t really thought about that; I was just thinking about stations reporting current conditions. But yeah, you’re right that that’s the important part. Is weather modeling software another one of those areas like CAD where the state-of-the-art is locked up in proprietary shit, or is it government/scientific enough that the software is public? If one were to start building a distributed weather prediction system, are we talking about refactoring existing software to be distributed or reading research papers and implementing algorithms from scratch?
My guess is that the ones that are really used are proprietary, but there are probably early versions of those that originated in academia that could be used.