Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Open v. Closed Source-Climate Change Research

Posted by timothy on from the it's-only-a-model dept.

theidocles writes "The ongoing debate over the 'hockey stick' climate graph has an interesting side note. McKitrick & McIntyre (M&M), the critics, have published their complete source code and it's written using the well-known R statistics package (covered by the GPL). Mann, Bradley & Hughes, the defenders, described their algorithm but have only released part of their source code, and refuse to divulge the rest, which really makes it look like they have some errors/omissions to hide (they did publish the data they used). There's an issue of open source vs closed source as well as how much publicly-funded researchers should be required to disclose - should they be allowed to generate 'closed-source' solutions at the taxpayers' expense?"

4 of 443 comments (clear)

  1. It should be called argh! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I hate projects with names like R. I used R a while back, and it's a great program, but try searching for "R" plugins on Google. Not fun.

    1. Re:It should be called argh! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Searching for LaTeX, on the other hand...

  2. too good to be true by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    This article has the potential for 2 flamewars. For or against global warming and for or against open source. Oh joy!

  3. Legal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    This is actually an interesting legal debate. How would you register a trademark on the letter R?

    R®????