I recently made some changes to a piece of (proprietary) code that my group uses which has made it two orders of magnitude faster. The code I updated wasn't mine and the original algorithm IP was published a few decades ago so I can't claim I did anything other than some clever refactoring/parallelizing (which somehow everyone else said wasn't possible). The impact of this update is such that work that would have taken months can now, in principle, be done in under a week (or from hours to minutes).
Unfortunately academia doesn't really reward 'enablers' for improving software so I'm not really sure what I can gain from this beyond some ideas in my own PhD that were not possible previously.
The critical point, compared to other questions I've seen on this topic, is that the code is now commercially viable. Understandably my supervisor is very happy and wants to keep things under wraps for the time being.
I'm aware that the university probably owns every line of code I just wrote. Do I have any ground to request compensation if the software starts being licensed? I don't want to sour the relationship I have with my supervisor which has up until now been very good (and I've just earned a lot of respect for this work).
If I was working in industry this is about the time I'd be going to my line manager and at asking for a salary bump or a promotion. In academia it seems like this sort of work is relegated to a pat on the back and a footnote. I suspect I'm being sour, but is this just the way it goes?
Am I allowed to ask that people cite the software even if it's not a publication (not that we have a website!)? For instance one can cite R, Numpy, etc.
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