GNU GPLv3 At the Heart of the Black Hole Image (www.tfir.io)

arnieswap quotes TFIR's report on the black hole image: Free and Open Source software was at the heart of this image. The team used three different imaging software libraries to achieve the feat. Out of the three, two were fully open source libraries. The source code of the software is publicly available on GitHub.

Richard M Stallman, the founder of the GNU Project will be glad to see that both libraries (Sparselab and ehtim) are released under GNU GPL v3. Yes, you read it right – GNU GPL v3.

Comments

Re:Moscow Donald Lied about Trump Tower Moscow

[Bobrick]

You got the wrong thread.

Free Software Won?

[martiniturbide]

Maybe free software already won the "software wars", now I think there should be a fight against the "close source cloud".

Re:Free Software Won?

[Anonymous Coward]

I appreciate good tools like everyone else but leave culture politics out of it, for example from the article: It’s a victory of diversity in the era of homophobia and sexism.

Re: Free Software Won?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? There isn't a "war", and commercial software developers are not your enemy, we all use the same tools to get the job done. This is the dumbest us-versus-them-ism. Software licensing is an extremely good motivator to create quality software, deal with it.

Re:Free Software Won?

[thegarbz]

now I think there should be a fight against the "close source cloud".

There are multiple open source cloud projects and many corporate providers using these projects. Shop around. Or if you have a decent internet connection, download OwnCloud or Seafile and host it yourself.

Matlab is doing fine for now, but future uncertain

[cerberusss]

I've worked at a national institute in Europe and worked on software for reading out infrared cameras for space-observing satellites. Everywhere around me, both scientists and engineers, were replacing (or trying to replace) Matlab and other commercial software with Python. There were some Fortran holdouts, but these were also migrating to Python. Software engineers used C++ for the core, but these were little nuggets that shoved data from custom electronics to ethernet, and then Python would pick up the packets.

For some specific stuff, especially electronics engineers were not replacing Matlab. For instance to model electromotors. Mechanical engineers likewise. I never knew what they were using, but open source was not used anywhere at our institute. But the rest: Python, NumPy and SciPy.

Re:Skeptical

[CptLoRes]

https://www.wimp.com/dr-katie-...

Re:Skeptical

[llamahunter]

They did a lot of work to make sure they eliminated expectation bias from the image processing. And, I believe they had 4 teams working on different algorithms, not allowed to collaborate with one another, and all of whom came up with more or less the same result.

Note the distinct line

[evanh]

between engineers and scientists.

Engineers are paid to deliver commercial products as quickly and cheaply as possible with little regard to actual knowledge ... until the company gets sued. There will be exceptions.

Scientists are paid to solved questions with testable and repeatable solutions. There will be exceptions.

Re:Skeptical

[Antique Geekmeister]

That speech seemed to present some frighteningly bad "science". To paraphrase: by building in filters to select from extremely noisy figures, we detect an image, much like sketch artists at a crime scene.

But sketch artists are historically _awful_, with their results tainted by racial stereotype and whatever the first witness leads the other witnesses to conclude that they must have seen. The result has been many convictions of innocent people. This talk is actually quite alarming, the woman does not seem aware of the likely experimental bias of what she does.

Re:Tivoization

[Antique Geekmeister]

It was because Tivo abused hardware locking to prevent any modification of the GPL based software they were providing. The freedom for users to modify software, "free as in speech", is one of the most critical aspects of "free software" licenses like the GPL. Tivo used GPLv2 software but locked its users hands by applying hardware based lockin, which was a direct violation of the spirit of the GPL.

Re:Matlab is doing fine for now, but future uncert

[AHuxley]

No Ada?

you read it right – GNU GPL v3

[manu0601]

you read it right – GNU GPL v3

Why is it remarkable? Is it because it is weird since the G of GPL already means GNU?

Re:you read it right – GNU GPL v3

[thegarbz]

Why is it remarkable? Is it because it is weird since the G of GPL already means GNU?

Yeah but the G in GNU means GNU so what we've really got here is the GNU Not Unix Not Unix Not Unix Not Unix Not Unix {caught buffer overflow exception} GNU Not Unix Not Unix Not Unix Not Unix Not Unix {caught buffer overflow exception} Proprietary License. ... Version THREE!

Re:you read it right – GNU GPL v3

[DdJ]

I suspect the reason some people think this is remarkable is that a bunch of projects (like the Linux kernel) make a big deal out of staying on v2.

Re:you read it right – GNU GPL v3

[DeVilla]

Your buffer overflows appear to be part of an exploit to replace "Public" with "Proprietary". Better scratch and restore from backups.

i would be surprised

[sad_]

i would be surprised if NO open source software would have been used.

GPL means "General Public License"

[jbn-o]

Why is it remarkable? Is it because it is weird since the G of GPL already means GNU?

While the initial "G" in GNU does mean GNU (GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix"), the "G" of "GPL" stands for "General"—General Public License. The GNU GPLs are so widely used and discussed that one can get away with saying "GPL" to mean one or more versions of the GNU General Public License. 'General' here means not specifically written for a particular GNU program. When GNU started different GNU programs had their own license—GNU Emacs General Public License for GNU Emacs, for example. It's not hard to see how this approach doesn't scale up well. The GNU GPLs are the license for many GNU programs. Today GNU GPL v3 is the latest such license and the license itself and GNU's pages about that license make it clear that the proper full name of this license is "GNU General Public License".

Re:Matlab is doing fine for now, but future uncert

[Thelasko]

Everywhere around me, both scientists and engineers, were replacing (or trying to replace) Matlab and other commercial software with Python.

How ironic! That's what I'm doing today. It would really be nice if scipy.io.loadmat would import nested MATLAB structures structures without a bunch of hacks.