The problem with these is that they get out of date; more over, if you use emacs a lot, then having to use different package management systems on different operating systems is also a pain. Likewise, with tools like R.
So, it all depends on your application and your requirements. I a combination of ELPA style packages, and checkout git repositories for my Emacs package management. And, yes, version conflicts happen. But, the alternative of living with very old packages isn't always great either.
Some publishers do require exclusivity. Some do not. There is a free-to-submit equivalent. Ironically, it's licence is also a bit restrictive for this sort of thing.
Basically, we got ourselves tied up here. It all made sense 20 years ago. Now it doesn't. The social incentives to give away our value for free are still there. And the publishers want to keep this also. Trying to make understand the situation now is pointless; you have to look at the history.
Hopefully, the future will be better than the present.
This is actually at the root of the problem. The general ideology is these days moving toward the idea that the private sector is the only plausible way to function. A marked change from the days when we a mixed economy with different kinds of entity were considered important; this is why we invented the legal frameworks for charities, not-for-profits and so forth. Perhaps all of this is pointless. Personally, I think not. There are some things that are worth achieving, could be achieved but for which is is hard to find a business model for.
One solution to this problem is hope that a few people earn pots of money, and then give it away in a fit of philanthropy. This can work, although there is a problem; generally these sort of entities are only willing to give money to things on which it is possible to attach an advert saying who bought it. This is, I think, the core problem here. Easy to stick a label on the side of a new van; much harder to do so with the diesel.
I think we will be, and are becoming, a poorer world for this. Perhaps the trend will turn back again.
The problem with type checking is that sooner or later you want to do something that is very hard to type check. So, then you have to reinvent and extend the type system. If you look, for example, at Java which had a nice simple type system, but one that was too simple; now we have upper bound, wild card types in the generics, which I still don't fully understand and have to look up every time I want to use. Complicated.
It also tends to complicate the development process, so that you spend a significant amount of time declaring types, often ones which do essentially very similar things. Again, using a Java example, there is no straight-forward way to iterate over all the methods of a class (you have to use reflection). One of the other hand, with Javascript, a class is just a hash with first class functions. And hashes provide iterators because it is the sort of thing hashes do.
Finally, type checking tends to add syntax; Java, again, is an extreme example, Scala much less so. If you want to build a DSL, for example, then the added syntax of types is significant. What ends up happening is the developer produces a config file which the application parses. With a simpler syntax for the language, you can just use the language instead.
Type checking is a good thing, but it is one that comes at a cost. As with many areas of programming, it is a question of weighing the gains and the losses.
The GPL is hard to understand, because it is quite long. This is because it is written to have legal meaning. It's the legal system(s) that is at fault here, I think.
A generic license like that is basically pointless, because it has to define what "revenue" actually is. I bet that Google could prove that they make no profit if they wanted to. In fact, they do prove that they make no profit, which is why the poor souls don't have to pay tax.
If you want this form of license on software that is GPL, then write to the authors and ask them. This will involve a period of contract negotiation, and they will probably only be bothered if you can convince them that you are likely to turn a profit. And away you go.
The bottom line problem is not that GPL is bad. It's that you don't have any money. Over the last twenty to thirty 30 years, we have transformed our societies to one where the market rules us; you don't have any money, well, tough.
Due diligence has many, many years of case law behind it. Before this bill, the likely damages to someone popping up and saying "hey that is my photo", after an organisation had made extensive searches for use of some material would be small. Especially compared to the damages to someone who, for example, had their photo taken, the metadata deliberately removed, then the image used without compensation.
Get sued because your dilligence wasn't very due, given that the same image was available at site X with declared metadata. People seem to be getting confused here because they think that it is the FILE that is copyright; it is not. It's the image.
Of course, if you then have to sue the large company for copyright violation, this might be quite hard, because they have more money and lawyers than you. But this is not substantially changed by this act; the law is a game for the rich now, as it was yesterday.
Seriously? XML? You really have to be joking. It's an authoring disaster. Just horrible to work with, it gets in your way, and soaks your mind away from what you should be thinking about -- content. Docbook is verbose and horrible to write. Any of the various text syntaxes that are out there betters XML from an authoring perspective.
LaTeX (or TeX) has one major advantage over them; you can macro away what ever you do a lot; even if it is something trivial like putting of decisions about how to capitalize words (macro them and work it out later). And for technical writing, this can be fantastic. This on the fly extensibility is something that I miss when ever I am not using latex.
Downside, basically, tex is all about page layout. Which means PDF. Mostly, these days, I want HTML -- page layout has to be dynamic in a world of changing devices.
I've had lots of visitors in my house, of various ages, various skills levels. Most of them managed to get a browser open on linux, then it all works from there.
Other way is to use a VM, with a snapshot, so you can just revert it when you have finished.
DIfferent parts of linux started out with different implications. The kernel started out as a hobby, and out of a desire to enable other hobbyist. Apache started out from a desire to provide a framework for collaboration, to support a particularly piece of software. GNU started out with a very definite attitude. Ubuntu started out with a mass market, consumer appeal agenda. RedHat, started off with a business focus.
Of course, because many users are technical, there is an ability to cope with technical problems among many users which can make them seem unforgiving of those with less.
For me, I use Ubuntu because I need a technical desktop for my work, but I do not want to have to play with or configure the desktop itself. At the moment, it still fulfils this niche. We shall see for the future. I don't want it to be hard for the non technical users, but I do not want the things I need to disappear; this is what makes Macs or Windows boxes hard for me.
He is right, though, I don't see why people get so upset about Ubuntu. It's okay. Mostly does the job.
These sites already exist. ArXiv for instance will publish anything (after complete crap detection). Wordpress will publish anything at all (with no complete crap detection).
I've taken a further step. I now refuse to review OA articles with excessive article charges. I *will* however review any article posted publicly, at the authors request. And post my review publicly.
They are funded by several grant bodies. I don't think elife is that much of an experiment, PLoS has already taken the middle costs of the market. eLife is aiming at nature and science.
The difference, I think, with peerj is that they are investing in technology. Even at $300 dollars for a paper (PeerJ charges per author), peer J is pretty cheap; it's possible that they have just found somewhere really cheap to outsource their type setting; alternatively, they have worked out a completely automatic system. I suspect the latter.
It is about time; most of the per paper costs of scientific publishing are in either the peer review, or the type setting. Both are amenable to technology; it's surprising that it has taken so long.
All scientific publishing is vanity press, by your measure. The alternative is "give me your work, so that I own it, and I will publish it". In one case you pay with cash, in another a commodity.
The idea that technology necessarily improves the way we do things is the fallacy in your argument. In practice, many people avoid this technology because it is really not worth the hassle for didactic gain that it brings.
Want to use a whiteboard? Take a pen. Want to use an "innovative" tablet approach -- well make sure the battery is charged, take your gear to the lecture theatre, discover that it doesn't work in the lecture theatre you are in.
The second point is that most "e-learning environments" are lowest common denominator. I asked once how big a file can I upload? Pretty big came the answer, think the limit is 60Mb or so. Not so useful when I want to upload an 7Gb ISO, or a 100Mb data set. Use of these environments is largely limited to uploading your powerpoints because uploading your powerpoints is all that they will do reliably.
Well, everybody defines their own ethics. RMS spends a lot of time thinking about them and argues for them with a degree of clarity and depth.
I don't think he would particularly object to his views being considered against competetive markets, nor being labelled a communist, except for two things. First, he doesn't think he is a communist. And second, because labelling someone a communist is generally used to avoid listening to what they are saying, at least in the US, anyway. He doesn't want that fate.
As a citizen, he has a legal right of abode in the US, and probably doesn't have the same right anywhere else.
Besides which, I think, being nationalistic about RMS's stance on fingerprints doesn't really make sense. Do you honestly think that he wouldn't condemn the US fingerprinting policy. RMS has been critcised for many things, but being too shy to criticise things he thinks are wrong would be a new one.
Many scientists do. As well as the expensive options like PLoS, there are many who just publish on their own blogs, or use tools like arxiv. At the moment, though, the credit structures don't acknowledge the cheap options, so we have to pay for the more expensive process, whether before or after.
Scientific publishing is on a knife edge at the moment. There is a lot of flux in the system. I hadn't heard of ReadCube -- there is also Mendeley and Zotero which offer good reference management capabilities. Then, in terms of journals which are, or are about to appear, there is Elife, F1000 Research, PeerJ. Then there is Figshare which is also NPG now. It's quite an interesting time. Some very big names are going to crash (Elsevier is kind of high on that list of possible losses; fingers crossed Springer goes as well).
The risk is, and I think it is a very real risk, is exactly that what this article suggests. We end up with iTunes; a single, dominant publisher who can define the publishing model, control the sytem regardless of the other stakeholders. It has happened in many other areas: google, facebook, amazon are all obvious examples.
I dislike the status quo intently, but this does not mean that replacing will necessarily produce a better result.
Networks are required to unlock phones, although they are allowed to recover their initial subsidy. The carriers state what their unlock policy is, and in general, if a phone is more than 1 year old, they are likely to do this for free. If they do not, or charge an excessive unlock fee, you can complain to the government regulator.
Most networks try not to tell you this, however. For instance, while looking for my phone I asked in a Virgin store what the unlock fee was: "we don't unlock phones" -- "OFCOM says you do", I replied. "Oh., what I mean is we don't unlock phones in store".
In the end, I bought a SIM free, unlocked phone, and a phone free SIM -- about the same cost as a locked phone and an unlock fee. My old phone (which was Vodaphone-locked) I had unlocked for free, took about 10 minutes. I now use it as a second phone when travelling for either my home SIM or a local, although, in practice at least in Europe, EU regulation means that buying a local SIM is often not worth the effort now.
A nice example of where government regulation can defeat a failed "free" market.
That's not a sensible argument. There are lots of free software projects that have not delivered. There are lots of proprietary projects that haven't delivered either. The standard figure, I believe, is that around 60% of software projects which are paid for and delivered are never used. The fact that Gnu has produced some software that does not get used is hardly good evidence that, therefore, they are not capable.
Incidentally, if you think that RMS' aim is to engineer a completely working free software system, then I think you have miss understood his motivations; free software has, for him, never been about engineering but freedom. He wants a free software system available for people to use, hack, modify, do what ever. His political aim of freedom long ago outweighed his desire to engineer things. So, the existence of linux really has changed the plans of Gnu. They haven't got a web server either; were apache not free, they would do.
I sometime Google docs these days for collaborative writing as it avoids the "pass the word doc" around nightmare. Although with dropbox the latter has got easier. In the end, the proposal gets turned into a word doc though for final formatting, because it is what people expect.
In terms of change tracking, I find this only works in word for a view people. Otherwise, you end up with change tracks everywhere and it's just an unreadable mess. Tex/latex in a versioning system can also work, although again only with so many changes and only if everyone is geeky enough to be able to use it.
I wish their were a perfect workflow, but there really isn't.
Actually, it doesn't. The results don't look that great, don't work in a web browser, often fail in screen-readers, are harder to archive, very difficult to text extract from. PDF is really pretty much a legacy format.
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The problem with these is that they get out of date; more over, if you use emacs a lot, then having to use different package management systems on different operating systems is also a pain. Likewise, with tools like R.
So, it all depends on your application and your requirements. I a combination of ELPA style packages, and checkout git repositories for my Emacs package management. And, yes, version conflicts happen. But, the alternative of living with very old packages isn't always great either.
Some publishers do require exclusivity. Some do not. There is a free-to-submit equivalent. Ironically, it's licence is also a bit restrictive for this sort of thing.
Basically, we got ourselves tied up here. It all made sense 20 years ago. Now it doesn't. The social incentives to give away our value for free are still there.
And the publishers want to keep this also. Trying to make understand the situation now is pointless; you have to look at the history.
Hopefully, the future will be better than the present.
This is actually at the root of the problem. The general ideology is these days moving toward the idea that the private sector is the only plausible way to function. A marked change from the days when we a mixed economy with different kinds of entity were considered important; this is why we invented the legal frameworks for charities, not-for-profits and so forth. Perhaps all of this is pointless. Personally, I think not. There are some things that are worth achieving, could be achieved but for which is is hard to find a business model for.
One solution to this problem is hope that a few people earn pots of money, and then give it away in a fit of philanthropy. This can work, although there is a problem; generally these sort of entities are only willing to give money to things on which it is possible to attach an advert saying who bought it. This is, I think, the core problem here. Easy to stick a label on the side of a new van; much harder to do so with the diesel.
I think we will be, and are becoming, a poorer world for this. Perhaps the trend will turn back again.
The problem with type checking is that sooner or later you want to do something that is very hard to type check. So, then you have to reinvent and extend the type system. If you look, for example, at Java which had a nice simple type system, but one that was too simple; now we have upper bound, wild card types in the generics, which I still don't fully understand and have to look up every time I want to use. Complicated.
It also tends to complicate the development process, so that you spend a significant amount of time declaring types, often ones which do essentially very similar things. Again, using a Java example, there is no straight-forward way to iterate over all the methods of a class (you have to use reflection). One of the other hand, with Javascript, a class is just a hash with first class functions. And hashes provide iterators because it is the sort of thing hashes do.
Finally, type checking tends to add syntax; Java, again, is an extreme example, Scala much less so. If you want to build a DSL, for example, then the added syntax of types is significant. What ends up happening is the developer produces a config file which the application parses. With a simpler syntax for the language, you can just use the language instead.
Type checking is a good thing, but it is one that comes at a cost. As with many areas of programming, it is a question of weighing the gains and the losses.
The GPL is hard to understand, because it is quite long. This is because it is written to have legal meaning. It's the legal system(s) that is at fault here, I think.
A generic license like that is basically pointless, because it has to define what "revenue" actually is. I bet that Google could prove that they make no profit if they wanted to. In fact, they do prove that they make no profit, which is why the poor souls don't have to pay tax.
If you want this form of license on software that is GPL, then write to the authors and ask them. This will involve a period of contract negotiation, and they will probably only be bothered if you can convince them that you are likely to turn a profit. And away you go.
The bottom line problem is not that GPL is bad. It's that you don't have any money. Over the last twenty to thirty 30 years, we have transformed our societies to one where the market rules us; you don't have any money, well, tough.
Due diligence has many, many years of case law behind it. Before this bill, the likely damages to someone popping up
and saying "hey that is my photo", after an organisation had made extensive searches for use of some material would
be small. Especially compared to the damages to someone who, for example, had their photo taken, the metadata
deliberately removed, then the image used without compensation.
Get sued because your dilligence wasn't very due, given that the same image was available at site X with declared metadata.
People seem to be getting confused here because they think that it is the FILE that is copyright; it is not. It's the image.
Of course, if you then have to sue the large company for copyright violation, this might be quite hard, because they have
more money and lawyers than you. But this is not substantially changed by this act; the law is a game for the rich now,
as it was yesterday.
Seriously? XML? You really have to be joking. It's an authoring disaster. Just horrible to work with, it gets in your way, and soaks your mind away from what you should be thinking about -- content. Docbook is verbose and horrible to write. Any of the various text syntaxes that are out there betters XML from an authoring perspective.
LaTeX (or TeX) has one major advantage over them; you can macro away what ever you do a lot; even if it is something trivial like putting of decisions about how to capitalize words (macro them and work it out later). And for technical writing, this can be fantastic. This on the fly extensibility is something that I miss when ever I am not using latex.
Downside, basically, tex is all about page layout. Which means PDF. Mostly, these days, I want HTML -- page layout has to be dynamic in a world of changing devices.
I've had lots of visitors in my house, of various ages, various skills levels. Most of them managed to get a browser open on linux, then it all works from there.
Other way is to use a VM, with a snapshot, so you can just revert it when you have finished.
DIfferent parts of linux started out with different implications. The kernel started out as a hobby, and out of a desire to enable other hobbyist. Apache started out from a desire to provide a framework for collaboration, to support a particularly piece of software. GNU started out with a very definite attitude. Ubuntu started out with a mass market, consumer appeal agenda. RedHat, started off with a business focus.
Of course, because many users are technical, there is an ability to cope with technical problems among many users which can make them seem unforgiving of those with less.
For me, I use Ubuntu because I need a technical desktop for my work, but I do not want to have to play with or configure the desktop itself. At the moment, it still fulfils this niche. We shall see for the future. I don't want it to be hard for the non technical users, but I do not want the things I need to disappear; this is what makes Macs or Windows boxes hard for me.
He is right, though, I don't see why people get so upset about Ubuntu. It's okay. Mostly does the job.
My journals use CLOCKKS or LOCKKS. Basically, their long term digital preservation plan is to have libraries underwrite them.
In practice, journals going bust is the best thing that could happen in many cases. The content would become free, without fear
of prosecution.
These sites already exist. ArXiv for instance will publish anything (after complete crap detection). Wordpress will publish anything at all
(with no complete crap detection).
I've taken a further step. I now refuse to review OA articles with excessive article charges. I *will* however review any article posted publicly, at the authors request. And post my review publicly.
Time to break the current system.
They are funded by several grant bodies. I don't think elife is that much of an experiment, PLoS has already taken the middle costs of the market. eLife is aiming at nature and science.
The difference, I think, with peerj is that they are investing in technology. Even at $300 dollars for a paper (PeerJ charges per author), peer J is pretty cheap; it's possible that they have just found somewhere really cheap to outsource their type setting; alternatively, they have worked out a completely automatic system. I suspect the latter.
It is about time; most of the per paper costs of scientific publishing are in either the peer review, or the type setting. Both are amenable to technology; it's surprising that it has taken so long.
All scientific publishing is vanity press, by your measure. The alternative is "give me your work, so that I own it, and I will publish it".
In one case you pay with cash, in another a commodity.
The idea that technology necessarily improves the way we do things is the fallacy in your argument. In practice, many people avoid this technology because it is really not worth the hassle for didactic gain that it brings.
Want to use a whiteboard? Take a pen. Want to use an "innovative" tablet approach -- well make sure the battery is charged, take your gear to the lecture theatre, discover that it doesn't work in the lecture theatre you are in.
The second point is that most "e-learning environments" are lowest common denominator. I asked once how big a file can I upload? Pretty big came the answer, think the limit is 60Mb or so. Not so useful when I want to upload an 7Gb ISO, or a 100Mb data set. Use of these environments is largely limited to uploading your powerpoints because uploading your powerpoints is all that they will do reliably.
Well, everybody defines their own ethics. RMS spends a lot of time thinking about them and argues for them with a degree of clarity and depth.
I don't think he would particularly object to his views being considered against competetive markets, nor being labelled a communist, except for
two things. First, he doesn't think he is a communist. And second, because labelling someone a communist is generally used to avoid listening to what they are saying, at least in the US, anyway. He doesn't want that fate.
As a citizen, he has a legal right of abode in the US, and probably doesn't have the same right anywhere else.
Besides which, I think, being nationalistic about RMS's stance on fingerprints doesn't really make sense. Do you honestly think that he wouldn't condemn the US fingerprinting policy. RMS has been critcised for many things, but being too shy to criticise things he thinks are wrong would be a new one.
Many scientists do. As well as the expensive options like PLoS, there are many who just publish on their own blogs, or use tools like arxiv. At the moment, though, the credit structures don't acknowledge the cheap options, so we have to pay for the more expensive process, whether before or after.
Scientific publishing is on a knife edge at the moment. There is a lot of flux in the system. I hadn't heard of ReadCube -- there is also Mendeley and Zotero which offer good reference management capabilities. Then, in terms of journals which are, or are about to appear, there is Elife, F1000 Research, PeerJ. Then there is Figshare which is also NPG now. It's quite an interesting time. Some very big names are going to crash (Elsevier is kind of high on that list of possible losses; fingers crossed Springer goes as well).
The risk is, and I think it is a very real risk, is exactly that what this article suggests. We end up with iTunes; a single, dominant publisher who can define the publishing model, control the sytem regardless of the other stakeholders. It has happened in many other areas: google, facebook, amazon are all obvious examples.
I dislike the status quo intently, but this does not mean that replacing will necessarily produce a better result.
Networks are required to unlock phones, although they are allowed to recover their initial subsidy. The carriers state what their unlock policy is, and in general, if a phone is more than 1 year old, they are likely to do this for free. If they do not, or charge an excessive unlock fee, you can complain to the government regulator.
Most networks try not to tell you this, however. For instance, while looking for my phone I asked in a Virgin store what the unlock fee was: "we don't unlock phones" -- "OFCOM says you do", I replied. "Oh., what I mean is we don't unlock phones in store".
In the end, I bought a SIM free, unlocked phone, and a phone free SIM -- about the same cost as a locked phone and an unlock fee. My old phone (which was Vodaphone-locked) I had unlocked for free, took about 10 minutes. I now use it as a second phone when travelling for either my home SIM or a local, although, in practice at least in Europe, EU regulation means that buying a local SIM is often not worth the effort now.
A nice example of where government regulation can defeat a failed "free" market.
That's not a sensible argument. There are lots of free software projects that have not delivered. There are lots of proprietary projects that haven't delivered either. The standard figure, I believe, is that around 60% of software projects which are paid for and delivered are never used. The fact that Gnu has produced some software that does not get used is hardly good evidence that, therefore, they are not capable.
Incidentally, if you think that RMS' aim is to engineer a completely working free software system, then I think you have miss understood his motivations; free software has, for him, never been about engineering but freedom. He wants a free software system available for people to use, hack, modify, do what ever. His political aim of freedom long ago outweighed his desire to engineer things. So, the existence of linux really has changed the plans of Gnu. They haven't got a web server either; were apache not free, they would do.
Phil
The UK and Europe. He's suggesting UTC, and the zero hour is here.
I sometime Google docs these days for collaborative writing as it avoids the "pass the word doc" around nightmare. Although with dropbox the latter has got easier.
In the end, the proposal gets turned into a word doc though for final formatting, because it is what people expect.
In terms of change tracking, I find this only works in word for a view people. Otherwise, you end up with change tracks everywhere and it's just an unreadable mess. Tex/latex in a versioning system can also work, although again only with so many changes and only if everyone is geeky enough to be able to use it.
I wish their were a perfect workflow, but there really isn't.
Phil
Actually, it doesn't. The results don't look that great, don't work in a web browser, often fail in screen-readers, are harder to archive, very difficult to text extract from. PDF is really pretty much a legacy format.