On Tue, 29 May 2012, Brendon Higgins wrote: > > http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6078/159.full > > [snip] > > Meanwhile we can just keep going forward making it all possible ;) > ... > In > this context, open _code_ and open _platforms_ are two different (albeit > related) beasts. > ... > Ideally the whole system should be open, not just the chunk of code unique to > each experiment.
Exactly! And there is more to it. Someone bold could event exaggerate that requiring "open code" on its own is **"useless"** besides for being an "ideal description of the method implementation". Why "useless"? Because in majority of the cases "open code" will hardly be usable by a considerable part of scientific community for one reason (e.g. as you pointed out commercial base) or another. Quite often simply because that code was not created to be used by others. Moreover, we all know, that even providing usable binaries accompanied by FOSS code, without formalized build procedures and clearly specified dependencies would complicate any extension of the code, thus often significantly reducing the benefit of having that code under FOSS license to begin with. As the result, mandating "open code" to accompany research papers would be of limited practical importance to the science due to difficulty of its adoption and extension. And that is where a platform which addresses those demands would be indispensable; but neither of those papers indeed goes that far. Overall all these recent trends are only of benefit for us to promote Debian because of its unique organization and "wealth" ;) -- Yaroslav O. Halchenko Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755 Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834 Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419 WWW: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
