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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?
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.
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.
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?
proprietary software the equivalent of intelligent design?
That doesn't quite sound right to me...
Open source is like a box of chocolates. I'm not sure why...I just wanted to say that. It's what I thought of when I read the story.
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.
crickets.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1259963&cid=28244145&art_pos=9
I think I posted it before but I can't find it off hand.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I wrote on that here: ...
"Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) Licensing issues"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/da82d9fd52265dbc?hl=en
"So basically, SME is using post-scarcity charitable dollars and tax
exemptions to finance the creation and distribution of artificial scarcity
of manufacturing information, which otherwise they could put up for free for
all on their website.
To be blunt, I feel it is unethical for a tax-exempt non-profit to withhold
17000 papers on manufacturing from easy global distribution, just so some
current staff can make money for future activities by creating artificial
scarcity. That is 20th century ethical reasoning, now outdated by easy
distribution via the internet at no incremental cost (I'm sure there are
many places like Ibiblio or Archive.org who would host them for free if
bandwidth was an issue). And making things "members only" doesn't really
solve it, and I'd expect even members can't redistribute content or make
derivative works without special permission. "
From stuff I wrote around 2001:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary
copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it
results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of
helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little
cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through
charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence,
with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by
the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become,
perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up
to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by
requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and
donations."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
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!
Code?
Programs are written in formal languages. Every program is an explicit mathemathical expression.
Hide the code, and your are invalidating the expression, just like showing a math result without stating the formula. That's not science, at all.
What's in a sig?
This article should be covered up, cast out, smothered, and wiped off the face of the intartubes. Somewhere in the Book of Gates, it must surely be written that Open Source is the work of the Devils, and that all who are contaminated by such heresy shall surely be cast into the lake of BSOD.
All who seek after the ways of wisdom are surely aware that both science and programming are best accomplished in secretive enclaves, and pursued by the holy clerics of Corporate America. Surely, in the pursuit of wisdom, lesser beings shall be confused and damned by their communistic, socialistic methods. No good can come of the curiosity of the little man.
Keep the science in the cathedrals, and keep the coding in Microsoft labs.
Thus speaketh the Gates.
All hail the great EULA!!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
There are useful failures, yeah. I'm not convinced this was one of them.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You plainly don't know science, and apparently missed the educational boat as well, if you are seriously pitching that "ivory tower" metaphor. If I assume your post is serious and not troll bait, you've been paying to much attention to the media declarations about nullities like "scientific consensus." There is not one field of science where there is uniform consensus among practitioners about anything. In very field you will find that the practitioners are divided into cliques, some of whom may have the media's and the politicians' ears and some of whom do not. These divisions would not exist if there was a true acceptance among the practitioners that a given theory was _the_ way things work. Not only that, science is not a democracy and the fact that a view is widely accepted is no assurance that it is true. If this were true, we would still be using Ptolemaic cosmology and fires would burn because of phlogiston.
You will often find many individuals in a field who treat some particular theory as the right one. I'm inclined to think that about plate tectonics for example. That does not mean that the currently preferred explanation is the correct one or the last word. There are dissenters in every field (even some geologists who doubt plate tectonics), even in fields that look pretty well settled, and they are dissenters (justifiably so) because the current and preferred explanation is _not_ quite adequate to all data available in the field. This the case from archaeology to cosmology, and as long as a given theory is not adequate to all phenomena addressed in a study area, that area will continue to be a science.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
The theory of Intelligent Design has a lot of holes.
So does proprietary software.
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.
I like your analogy. Forcing people with no wheels to invent a car. Clearly, concisely, and accurately depicts the nature of the problem-- Thank You!
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.