If the software were open source, then funding would not matter. It could be supported (or at least used) by the user base. Withdrawing the use of published software because of funding issues represents a problem that can be remedied by enforcing (at the referee level) open source licenses.
We allow (or rather can’t prevent) the use of other published information long after the funding that produced said knowledge dries up. The situation should be no different with software. James On May 12, 2015, at 1:08 PM, Gloria Borgstahl <gborgst...@gmail.com> wrote: > Did they stop supporting it due to lack of renewed funding and having to cut > staff that had the knowledge? > I'm pretty sure you only know part of the story. > > > On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 11:48 AM, James Stroud <xtald...@gmail.com> wrote: > I hereby call on the broadest community of academics and researchers, > including scientists, historians, economists, sociologists, psychologists, > and whoever else has ever published a paper or read from the literature > thereof, to reject any and all papers that describe new software that itself > is not released under an open source model. > > I further declare that this post is designed to ruffle feathers and incite > incendiary conversation, to provoke all-caps and evoke multiple exclamation > marks with interposed “1”s where anger prevents one from properly holding the > shift key. > > My rationale for this post: I have just spent a week installing software for > structural biology (not crystallography) only to find that some of the key > utilities needed were described in a recent publication but were not OSS. The > authors have decided to stop supporting the software but have not retracted > their paper, which is completely irrelevant without the availability of the > software package they describe. > > Let’s hammer this one out and come to the rational conclusion that non-OSS > software should not be awarded publications. > > James >
