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Paper Retracted After Anti-Immigrant Scientist Bans Use of His Software (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: An 11-year-old research paper describing Treefinder, a computer program used by evolutionary biologists, has been retracted after the program's developer banned its use in European countries he deemed too friendly to refugees. In September, German scientist Gangolf Jobb announced on his website that researchers in eight European countries, including Germany and the United Kingdom, were no longer allowed to use Treefinder, which builds phylogenetic trees from sequence data. The move sparked outrage among some scientists, and now, BMC Evolutionary Biology has pulled the 2004 paper describing the software because the license change 'breaches the journal's editorial policy on software availability.'

4 of 418 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Easy to explain by amiga3D · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There is no question. The publisher is reacting to the change in license as well they should. Regardless of the motivation the license change violates their policy. What's the point of having a policy and then not following it?

  2. Re:The strings are his to attach by JackieBrown · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It sort of surprised me but then I thought about it and it pretty much paralleled how many people in the US act towards Mexican immigrants.

    Legal or illegal Mexican immigrants? I live in San Antonio and we are extremely tolerant toward legal Mexican immigrants. The Mexican Americans are not please with the illegal ones due to the jobs and resources they lose/share. For the most part, they really look down on them.

    Besides organizations like LaRaza, most of the support for illegal Mexicans comes from white people - usually either due to reasons of "white guilt" or cheap labor.

  3. Re:Easy to explain by lgw · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I agree with most of that, but I think you missed the most important point: why is key academic software not open source? I'm all for this guy's right to publish software under any license he chooses, but why would you embrace such software in the academic community? IMO, that's the lesson here.

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  4. Re:LOL by GLMDesigns · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So. Who decides who enters the country? The citizens or everyone else? And what do you do with immigrants that do not want to conform to the norms of the parent country?

    It's not simply a matter of calling someone a neo-na%i f**ta7d

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