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What Open Source Shares With Science
An anonymous reader sends in a philosophical piece at ZDNet about the similarities between open source development and the scientific method. Here's an excerpt:
"The speed of progress is greatly enhanced by virtue of the fact the practitioners of Science publish not only results, but methodology, and techniques. In programmatic terms, this is equivalent to both the binary and the source code. This not only helps 'bootstrap' others into the field, to learn from the examples set, but makes it possible for others to verify or refute the results (or techniques) under investigation. In an almost guided-Darwinian evolutionary fashion, this makes the scientific process a powerful tool for the highlighting, analysis and possible culling of ideas and concepts; less useful ideas and hypothesEs die, and likely contenders come sharply into focus. Newton made his famous comment about 'standing on the shoulders of giants,' in part, to indicate that his contributions to human knowledge could not have been achieved solely. He needed the 'firmament' beneath him hypothesized, tested and confirmed by generations of scientists, philosophers and thinkers before him, over centuries."
Sadly, education has yet to follow this trend. Computer Science and Computer Engineering classes have yet to implement significant group collaboration. And while the hack tenet of "something that has been done once shouldn't be done again" was a conceived by some bright students, educators still give identical tedious projects that have the students complete in isolated groups, many times of consisting by just. There has even been an instance of a student being threatened to fail a class because he posted the source code of his project. How can we expect future developers to collaborate when their education forces a way to work that is very alien to the open culture and resembles that of a proprietary company
Why hasn't the scientific community produced open textbooks, free to re-print, photocopy and distribute (a la Creative Commons license)
Why is it hard for pioneering ideas like that of the state of California trying to open their school textbooks to be implemented?
As long as scientific results and techniques are hidden in very expensive privately-run journals and conference proceedings,
it cannot in any sense be considered open in the same sense as open-source or "fsf-free" software.
I would like to pursue scientific research as an amateur, but am prevented from doing so.
And this problem doesn't apply only to me, but to countless fully qualified scientists whose institutions cannot
afford the knowledge.
Science badly needs a Bastille day.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
WRT both science and OSS, the cathedral and the bazaar are converging. In science, the number and the size of the "ivory towers" is growing all the time, and they're getting better about sharing information both between institutions and the world as a whole. In OSS, while it's true that anyone can jump in at any time, the most successful OSS projects generally center around a core development team which carefully vets contributions. As for your use of quotation marks around the word "qualified" ... while amateurs may sometimes make significant contributions in both science and software, the truth of the matter is that a formal education in the subject at hand makes it a lot more likely that your work will be good enough to be useful to the field.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
People would be surprised how much software is developed under grant from the gov and is NOT open source. Some institutions like Cal Tech refuse to release their source code or even license it under an open source license that lets them retain copyright.
Yes, yes, we all know about 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar', but your characterisation of science as a cathedral with priests is way out of line. The same spirit of taking what works and building on it is the foundation of scientific endeavour. There's no "one true way" or revered holy texts of science, only what works. When something is found to not work, it has to be changed or discarded...
You can try belittling qualifications, but getting qualified isn't some sort of indoctrination process (or at least it shouldn't be, granted it might resemble indoctrination in some places, but I submit that those places are turning out bad scientists, however qualified they are). As science advances, the necessary knowledge, experience and learning to make a meaningful contribution only grows, meaning people have to spend those years of study and specialisation, learning about what's gone before, to reach a point in a field where they can do something new.
What is this 'qualification' you speak of?
Granted, your odds of getting peer reviewed is quite small without the requisite sheepskins hanging on your office wall. But there's nothing in the rule book that says science can't be done in one's garage.
The nature of some science dictates the need for some rather exotic equipment. And my neighborhood has a covenant against building LHCs in one's garage. But it isn't unknown for amateurs to discover comets or other objects.
Have gnu, will travel.
Software, like science, produces a non-rival public good. (Nonrival means it is not consumed when somebody uses it.) But there are private research companies just like there are private software companies.
I used to work in a publicly-funded virology lab studying Hepatitis C Virus (HCV). My biggest result was finding this particular human gene that HCV required in order to infect a person. If you took liver tissue, knocked out that gene, and tried to infect it with HCV... no infection. Has anyone seen this before? Nothing in the scientific literature, but we found a dusty old patent from a company that had clearly found this connection years earlier, but never published it or followed it up. The company was likely hedging its bets in case it wanted to follow up later. HCV kills tens of thousands of people a year (liver cancer). Just makes me so frustrated.
Most people are already familiar with negative market externalities like pollution or overfishing. Science and software both exemplify positive externalities, which are just as problematic in free market capitalism. If only there were a clear way to internalize externalities!
You are wrong. Anyone can practice science --- follow the scientific method and you are a scientist.... The problem is whether you've established a history of valid application of that method and if your demonstrates that integrity upon review for publication.
The ivory towers you pretend to exist are only a figment of your imagination and/or ignorance.
Granted, your odds of getting peer reviewed is quite small without the requisite sheepskins hanging on your office wall. But there's nothing in the rule book that says science can't be done in one's garage.
Except for the laws about civilian's having/using high explosives.....
That's like saying no one can do professional software development out of their home office because they don't have mainframe.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Science being done by "qualified" priests in ivory tower cathedrals...let's pick this horrible, 180 degrees off analogy apart, shall we?
First off, there's no need for the scare quotes. Academic science is done by a range of individuals. At the high end we've got professors and staff scientists who have decades of relevant experience. They're qualified to lead research groups and/or provide detailed technical expertise. A rung down you've got postdocs with 10-15 years of experience and then graduate students with a handful of years. They handle the month to month details, are in charge of a subset of the research, and are also there for training and education. Under them are undergrads who are learning how to go about doing research. This bottom rung has little to no qualifications or experience. The top, well, you go to a dentist for a root canal, a surgeon for a new heart valve, and a mechanic to tune your car engine. All "qualified" individuals within their areas of expertise, with years to decades of specialized training the average person doesn't have. If you've got a problem with that, then take your car to the dentist, your faulty heart valve to your mechanic, and your root canal to the guy who delivers your pizzas.
Second, when you think "ivory tower" you should think of a dilapidated building constructed on the cheap back in the 70's, with decades of deferred maintenance, that's 50% over-capacity, and that isn't going to be updated or replaced any time soon because the state legislature has been slowly strangling the university (most universities are public institutions and account for most academic research) ever since hippies first walked the earth.
Third, priests and cathedrals...wow that's a bad analogy, BadAnalogyGuy. The primary job of a priest is to uphold and disseminate dogma THAT MUST NOT BE QUESTIONED. Penalties range from merely being shunned to the death penalty, depending on the time, place, religion, and of course the question. The primary job of a scientist begins with asking interesting questions. Then figure out how to answer them, and follow the conclusions wherever they lead, even if they run head long into long held and widely supported views. Except for the fact that most priests and most academic scientists are poor, priests and scientists are polar opposites.
Why not free up the educational system and put K1 right up through the Ph.D. level of education as free, open source, tools available in towns as well as on the net. Education is simply a form of information. Let's get the for money players out of the loop.
The ivory towers you pretend to exist are only a figment of your imagination and/or ignorance.
I'd go one further; I'd say the ivory towers exist more in OSS. If you can't program, you can't really contribute. Sure you can bug test betas and so on, which I do, but I can't write in C++, so I can't go and fix random bits that are broken or submit patches, though I'd dearly like to.
It's easier to pick up a basic understanding of the scientific method than to understand programming without education.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
I get the joke, but right now you're modded interesting so you get a serious reply.
The useful contributors to open source are not only highly skilled but they're also much fewer in number than contributors to science. If you want to contribute to science you can pretty much show up at a lab with half a brain, say you'd like to work for free, and you'll probably get your name on a paper after a bit.
I think it's important to note that open source is important for scientific ethics. As scientists, we are required to disclose everything about what we do - the methods, the errors, the methodologies - just as the article points out. If we don't, we are breaking a code of behavior that exists for the integrity and reliability of the field. How is it justifiable to go and hide that behind the shield of proprietary software in the DAQ or analysis just because somebody like SPSS wants to shut out competition? The answer is simple: it's not. Closed-source is actually scientifically unethical.
There's "nothing in the rule book" in that the laws of physics don't preclude it but an education sure isn't an impediment! I am amused by the way you trivialize years of disciplined study and forging connections within a field as some kind of rain dance and equate discovering something (which anyone can do with some luck and equipment) to characterizing it in a form that expands the boundaries of scientific understanding (aka research). Why is it so hard for slashdot readers to accept that there are other technical disciplines and epistemic traditions that deserve respect and on the whole do in fact know something autodidact programmers don't?