During my PhD, the lab invested a lot of software development effort into a closed-source robotics platform that was discontinued [1]. I will try hard to avoid closed platforms in the future.
As academics, I feel we should put in our best effort to use and contribute back to open-source platforms. It's not crazy to spend the first year of your PhD adding a feature to an open-source package if it will boost your research productivity for the next 4 years. It's also easier to work around limitations when you only need to run one experiment instead of producing a robust product.
[1] Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight, a RPi-sized board with onboard stereo cameras and GPS. The hardware was unbeatable at the time.
As academics, I feel we should put in our best effort to use and contribute back to open-source platforms. It's not crazy to spend the first year of your PhD adding a feature to an open-source package if it will boost your research productivity for the next 4 years. It's also easier to work around limitations when you only need to run one experiment instead of producing a robust product.
[1] Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight, a RPi-sized board with onboard stereo cameras and GPS. The hardware was unbeatable at the time.