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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."
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?
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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!