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."

Comments

I disagree that Open Source is like Science

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Are you sure? Because science is done by a handful of "qualified" people working in ivory towers. A cathedral staffed with priests, if you will.

Open Source, though, is more like a bazaar. Wild and eclectic, the bazaar atmosphere takes the best and worst of everything, stirs it together, and produces some of the finest things found anywhere. Everyone has a say and anyone can set up shop.

I'm no millionaire, but I'd say that Open Source is much more like a bazaar than a cathedral.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay for factual errors!

Newtons comment with regards to 'standing on the shoulders of giants' was actually just a jab at Robert Hooke (the two eminent Physicists hated each other, with the phrase originating in a letter Newton sent to Hooke).

However, Hooke was of significantly smaller stature than Newton, so by 'standing on the shoulders of giants' Newton was telling Hooke that he had learning nothing from him.

Although a fantastic scientist Newton was a very poor example of a human being, he was rude, offensive and incredibly stuck up.

Re:Standing on the shoulders of giants

[SoVeryTired]

Hooke was a bit of a bastard himself. He claimed to have reviewed Newton's theory of colour, which was perfectly correct. In fact, Hooke just trashed it in favour of his own theory. This rejection made Newton extremely reluctant to publish any of his other ideas, which may have set science back thirty years.

With this in mind, perhaps the jab wasn't all that unjustified.

Re:Science is not open

[SoVeryTired]

I can't speak for other disciplines, but Mathematics is quite open. While most journals do not publish their papers, most decent academics have PDFs of their publications on their website, or on ArXiV. It's rarely a problem to find what you're looking for, even without a university subscription to a selection of journals.

Amateur research is extremely difficult to conduct productively these days, since all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Most experiments need teams of people and highly expensive labs to run. The peer review process would also need to change considerably if we moved to a truly open system. While I agree thet you may have a point, I don't think it's quite as cut-and-dried as you make it out to be.

Re:Sadly, education is lagging behind once again.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Computer Science and Computer Engineering classes have yet to implement significant group collaboration.

Or they go too far in the other direction. I distinctly remember one database class in my MS curriculum which had thirty people working together on a one-semester project, and it was a nightmare. At the time I was working as a DBA lead with a team of five people including myself, which was a pretty good number for our project, so I had a pretty decent idea of how things should work. Trying to get thirty CS students, only a couple of whom had any real industry experience, to work together on a single project in that length of time was just Not Going To Happen. I tried very hard to get the professor to break the class into a few groups and have each group work independently on the problem, but he wouldn't budge; he had a Grand Vision of what all these people working together would accomplish. The mythical man-month in action.

The result was pretty much what you'd expect. Three-quarters of the class slacked off, a quarter did all they could, and instead of a working project at the end of the semester we had a half-finished mess. A few of us strongly suspected hat what he really wanted was a polished product he could distribute under his own name, so this chaos may in fact have been a silver lining ... But the experience was of no real value to anyone in the end.

This is an intersting argument...

[meburke]

By argument, I mean in the logical sense, such as a "claim" bolstered by "proof, information, and example". (I'm trying to separate the /. process of somebody posting something and someone else immediately disagreeing. But, Hey, I'm not trying to start an argument here about slashdot postings...)

So, I wonder if this argument has been used in the patent "process vs. product" or "software patent" courts. It seems to me that patents are generally awarded to the "products of Science" rather than the science itself. If code processes, algorithms, and concepts are Science, then patents should only be awarded to the "products of Science" such as individual chips or other hardware that utilizes the software and not the software itself. This argument could help clarify the boundaries of the patentable domain.