Open v. Closed Source-Climate Change Research

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?"

Comments

real government research goals

[MyRuger]

Obviously you have never written an SBIR or BAA. You when you do research "At the tax payers expense", you need to show your plans to commercialize the results of the research. The government wants you to create a IP twoards a commerial project which will spur the economy, not to contribute to the scientific community as a whole. Take it as you will, but I think that most research would not get funded if your commertilization plan was to release it on sourceforge.

with open source, everyone can see you're dumb

[Nick Barnes]

See this debunking of McKitrick's work, showing, among other things, how he:

• denies that average temperature is meaningful,
• confuses degrees with radians,
• invents a whole new temperature scale,
• replaces missing data with zeroes