People not liking open source (and it's not Oracle)

I've already dealt with this argument so far... but it's really so crazy that I can't prevent myself from blogging again on it, also taking advantage of this article by ACM titled "Should code be Released". The subcaption says it all "Software code can provide important insights into the results of research, but it's up to individual scientists whether their code is released - any many opt not to.".So, some scientists still refuse to publish the code that helped them in achieving a certain theory. While I'm certainly not so naive to assert that they should publish to SourceForge since their first commit, once one has published his research to a couple of relevant places, and has bound his name to that research, arguing that releasing the code could help others to "steal" is really hilarious. On the contrary, we all know how big a difference in quality the open source approach can deliver. Science is based on peer review: how the hell can be that a theory is peer reviewed if you can't reproduce the steps to get to the underlying model? While in our community we are only poor technologists and not scientists, everybody would scream in disgust if I only dared to assert "I have demonstrated that Java is 5x faster than C", but I don't release the benchmark code so everybody can try it. I can only conclude that many scientists are not confident at all with their theories, or they are purportedly cheating.

Date: November, 07 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici/archive/2010/11/07/people-not-liking-open-source-and-its-not-oracle

Others News