Slashdot Mirror
Should Public Funds Mean Public Code?
Lisa points to this article on oreillynet with "two opposing viewpoints on whether all software created by publicly funded research should be licensed as open source, and the chance to weigh in yourself." Open-source software (under whatever license) seems to me like a good way to multiply the investment of tax dollars that public funding relies on, but the counterarguments offered here are interesting.
The author of the article opposing release of publicly funded works under an open source license seems to have a misconception as to what common free software licenses say constitutes source code. From the anti-OSS article:
Open source licenses rarely require that local changes be distributed. Open source licenses do not set a limit on the fees charged. Open source licenses set no restriction on when, how, or where the source is distributed (with minor exceptions). As an open source publisher I am free to release my source code only once a year, at a charge of $1 million paid at least two months in advance, and you have to accept it on paper tape while we are both standing under the Eiffel Tower. (I'll cover my own travel arrangements if you take me up on this.) If I am the original copyright holder I'm even allowed to obfuscate the code by removing comments, using nonsense variable names, and other tricks.
This conflicts with the most common definition of source code. The GNU General Public License, one of the most popular free software licenses, specifies the following in section 3: "Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange," that is, something other than paper tape. Also, "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it," meaning that if reasonable comments aid modification, leave them in.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Kind of like TurboTax, but for free. And if it's open-source, so much the better, you can cheat on your taxes and still blame it on the software :)
Sure, but it would look like this:
for (int i=[BLACK];i<[BLACK];i++) {
if ([BLACK]) {
callFunction([BLACK]);
} else {
[BLACK];
}
[BLACK](i);
}
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Should there be anything in my \tmp directory when I first install?
Calm down, it's *only* ones and zeroes.