Slashdot Mirror
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writes: An 11-year-old research paper describing Treefinder, a computer program used by evolutionary biologists, has been retracted after the program's developer banned its use in European countries he deemed too friendly to refugees.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.'
Let's do it!
Is it even possible to retroactively change the terms of a software license like that?
Or did the new license only apply to new versions of the software?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Some people recognize immigrant has become synonymous with "slave" or "underclass", depending on the culture.
When the US Republicans talk about needing to compete in the global economy and how the US is strangling business, they aren't talking about the EU powerhouses which have higher business and social taxes. They are talking about the industrializing asian nations with penny wages and how the US needs to compete with them (ostensibly via the immigrant workforce). Many western nations have a similar problem and solution, where cheap labor/immigrants are available. Morality aside, at least he's bringing up the topic.
You clearly have never been to a Home Depot in the morning on a work day.
This is why I will never say anything bad about Mexican immigrants. You see dozens of them out at Home Depot waiting patiently for hard work. I have NEVER seen a unemployed white guy out there. I only ever see white people standing on street corners with cardboard signs, begging for handouts. I welcome immigrants (documented or otherwise) willing to come to our country and work hard to get ahead. Good for them. The only welfare leeches I see are the native citizens with a sense of entitlement that aren't willing to try to do some real work when they are unemployed.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
why is key academic software not open source?
Because people do the minimum required to get publications (and/or money), and cleaning up source code (so it can be exposed to the world) is a lot of work. This is especially the case if the code depends on other libraries with various different software licenses.
One of the ways to help fix this problem is to place restrictions on publication, so that open source licences are required for software. F1000 Research has just changed their policy to do this:
http://blog.f1000research.com/...
We recently strengthened our stance on software availability to better align with our Open Science principles. Now, the source code underlying any newly presented software must be made publicly available and assigned an open license. We strongly encourage the use of an OSS approved licence, but will accept other open licenses including Creative Commons. Software papers describing non-open software, code and/or web tools will be rejected.
The current situation demonstrates that forcing these licenses is required in order to get people to use them. BMC Evolutionary Biology already had a recommendation for open source licenses in its policy:
BMC Evolutionary Biology recommends , but does not require, that the source code of the software should be made available under a suitable open-source license that will entitle other researchers to further develop and extend the software if they wish to do so. Typically, an archive of the source code of the current version of the software should be included with the submitted manuscript as a supplementary file. Since it is likely that the software will continue to be developed following publication, the manuscript should also include a link to the home page for the software project. For open source projects, we recommend that authors host their project with a recognized open-source repository such as bioinformatics.org or sourceforge.net
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Most of these people are economic migrants, not refugees. In the case of Syrians now flooding into Europe, for example, most did not come directly from Syria — they came from migrant camps in Turkey. Turkey is a stable and safe country, but doesn't provide quite the level of social services and economic opportunities that a Western European country does. Of course, as has been pointed out in various places, the German government is worried about an aging population and needs young workers, so they opened the gates under the pretense of humanitarian reasons — preservation of culture, values, and social cohesion be damned.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
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.
Maybe that's just a San Antonio thing. In the rest of the country, Mexican Americans are trying every rhetorical and legal trick they can to make illegal immigrants welcomed. That includes:
*) Lobbying for "sanctuary city" status, where the local government is prohibited from working with state/feds unless the subject is suspected of non-immigration-related crimes.
*) Opposition to the phrase "illegal immigrants," because they say a person can't be illegal. Even though their very presence is a continued, illegal action, that there's pretty much nothing they can do short of returning across the border without it being illegal.
*) Using "immigrant" as much as possible to describe both legal and illegal immigrants. They want to blur that line as much as possible so they can attack politicians and other groups for being "anti-immigrant," when they only oppose illegal immigrants.
*) The usual cries about pulling apart families, etcetc.
*) Not bring up the issue of legal immigrants going through the legal process and waiting to become US citizens. They don't want to talk about that at all.
I disagree with the assertion that most of the support comes from white people. Just listen to Latino USA on NPR, watch Univision, or other Hispanic or Mexican American channels. It's stated by both sides without controversy that the reason Republicans have so little support with Hispanic/Mexican-American is their illegal immigration stance, and their attempts to court those ethnicities is a big reason why Republicans have blocked action on illegal immigration matters.
It's the cultural differences that matter.
In the EU the cultures don't vary much, even when comparing most western to most eastern countries. Turks, Syrians, Kurds are very very different than, say, Romanians, Greeks or Bulgarians.
This matters a lot because while you change the country, changing yourself is hard and many of them bring that culture with them, finding it easier to compromise a little and continue as they did back home instead of adopting everything from their new country.
This is what angers people when it comes to immigrants. They don't see them as fellow citizens born in another country, but foreigners with the same rights and benefits, but with additional perks. Recognition from the state for their special status, help to integrate in various ways, belonging to a minority, political or social group. I don't know any social psychology but it's all there.
To get back to your issue, Mexico is USAs neighbor and both cultures interconnect a lot. There are very few cultural barriers and most of them are either understood by both sides or simply accepted as normal.
Personally, I was curious about moving to another country early in life, but it was just wanderlust. If you can't make a home where you are now, changing the geographical location won't help much. Of course, living in a country with any kind of war going is different matter.
There was this old guy who was a friend of my wife's family who was smart, and funny, and an all around reasonable guy -- unless the topic of hispanics came up. And then it was like he was a totally different person. He became a ranter, and everyone around him would try to change the subject.
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that he hated Hispanics. As far as he was concerned if you were born hispanic that automatically made you useless, human trash. For the life of me I couldn't figure out where he got that hatred. As it turns out I grew up in the same neighborhood he did, albeit forty years later, and only when I was a kid were there many hispanics moving in. He'd moved up in the world after WW2; he left the neighborhood and lived in a series of lily-white suburbs. So as far as I could tell he'd never even *known* any hispanics personally.
And in the end I came to the conclusion that was the whole point. He didn't hate backs, or Poles, or Jews, or Catholics or Italians -- because he grew up in a neighborhood with all of those kinds of people, or served with them during the war. His opinions on hispanics was formed in a kind of vacuum. After that forty years of confirmation bias, unchecked by any actual firsthand experience turned what had been commonplace casual bigotry into full-blown batshit craziness.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.