Science funding and open source software

[phrostbyte]

Do you think Universities who get public funding for research purposes be required to open source any software that was produced as a result of their research? Why/why not?

[RiceMonster]

It may surprise you to find I'm going to say yes to this. If it's publicly funded, and it's supposed to be made available for the whoever wants it, then source code should be available to study, and extend, and people should have the right to freely distribute it as they see fit.

[fatcrab]

If I (tax payer) paid for it,YES.

[thatguruguy]

Sure, why not?

[JDShu]

In the vast majority of cases, yes. Unless theres a good academic reason for not providing all the source code (like in folding@home) I can't think of a reason why it would be a bad thing.

[lukeiamyourfather]

Do you think Universities who get public funding for research purposes be required to open source any software that was produced as a result of their research? Why/why not?

From what I've seen its not really a big enough problem to even merit this discussion about it. Is there a particular incident that is instigating this?

I think encouragement would be good but not a requirement. Its not always black and white on the books. Private corporations and individuals make contributions to universities and public organizations all the time both monetary and intellectual property. So where does the line get drawn about what has to be open source what doesn't have to be?

[JDShu]

From what I've seen its not really a big enough problem to even merit this discussion about it. Is there a particular incident that is instigating this?

I think encouragement would be good but not a requirement. Its not always black and white on the books. Private corporations and individuals make contributions to universities and public organizations all the time both monetary and intellectual property. So where does the line get drawn about what has to be open source what doesn't have to be?

Corporate or individual contributions would not be public funding.

But you're right. I think most academically produced software is already open source, so its not really a problem.

[blueshiftoverwatch]

Do you think Universities who get public funding for research purposes be required to open source any software that was produced as a result of their research? Why/why not?
If by "open source" you mean released into the public domain, than yes. If tax payers are paying for it than it should be free for anyone to use for any purpose. Not confined to a "restrictive" copyleft license like the GPL.

Unless theres a good academic reason for not providing all the source code (like in folding@home) I can't think of a reason why it would be a bad thing.
I'm not familiar with Folding@Home, why is there good acedemic reason for it to not be open source?

[JDShu]

I'm not familiar with Folding@Home, why is there good acedemic reason for it to not be open source?

Their FAQ says that they don't want people cheating and writing clients that send bogus results in the hopes of getting more points. The rest of the project is open source however.

[thatguruguy]

Folding@home also has a lot of corporate sponsors, including companies like google, ATi, nvidia, apple and Dell computers. If those corporate sponsors are donating material and/or expertise, and don't want everything they've contributed to become open source, I think that's probably their right.

[blueshiftoverwatch]

Their FAQ says that they don't want people cheating and writing clients that send bogus results in the hopes of getting more points. The rest of the project is open source however.
Seti@Home is open source and they get around that problem by randomly sending out the same data unit to several people. So that one person can't tamper with the results without the other people sending in the legitimate results. It's still theoretically possible that all of the people that got the data unit could tamper with the results, but highly unlikely.

[JDShu]

Seti@Home is open source and they get around that problem by randomly sending out the same data unit to several people. So that one person can't tamper with the results without the other people sending in the legitimate results. It's still theoretically possible that all of the people that got the data unit could tamper with the results, but highly unlikely.

hmmm interesting. I suppose that open sourcing the client would cost them the processing power lost by making multiple people do the same thing. It seems to me that they really want this stuff to be done fast, hence the scoring system to encourage people to participate.

[blueshiftoverwatch]

Actually, I'm not even sure why Seti@Home does that. They could get around having to do redundant processing by just sending out X data unit to Y person, having the person submit the data, and if the data seemed to suggest that they found ET they could process the data unit themselves to verify that it wasn't tampered with.

All that would be required is massive hard drive space to store all data units for Z period of time. Until they were processed by the people in the distributed computing network and returned.

EDIT: Of course, this is assuming that someone would want to tamper with data to make it look like there was ET when there really wasn't. It wouldn't work for people who wanted to throw a monkey wrench into the project and setup their computers so that it would send the data back to look like there wasn't ET when there really was.

[JDShu]

ahaha since every work unit in folding@hotme is important I guess such an approach wouldn't work. Apparently rosetta@home, which does similar stuff, is not open source either.

[lukeiamyourfather]

Corporate or individual contributions would not be public funding.

My point is they are often mixed, complicating matters. Its not so black and white where its either completely public funding completely private funding (and intellectual property) but instead there are many shades of gray. Cheers!

[JDShu]

My point is they are often mixed, complicating matters. Its not so black and white where its either completely public funding completely private funding (and intellectual property) but instead there are many shades of gray. Cheers!

Hmmm so I guess you're saying that there are researchers who are funded by multiple sources. Ignore me if I sound insane or if this isn't what you mean. I should be sleeping :P

My understanding is that private funding often has conditions, such as signing over IP rights etc. I think that it would be reasonable for the government to have similar conditions, such as releasing into the public domain whenever there is funding from a public source. This might make it more difficult for researchers to get adequate funding as government and corporations probably have mutually exclusive requirements... but that might not be worse than governments funding something that is then handed over to a company.