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

Posted by EditorDavid on from the artistic-license dept.

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.

4 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Free Software Won? by martiniturbide · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

  2. Matlab is doing fine for now, but future uncertain by cerberusss · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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  3. Note the distinct line by evanh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. you read it right – GNU GPL v3 by manu0601 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?