Public funded research results should be public! (was) ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Roderick A Gammon]

"And our gov't needs to pass laws that our tax dollars can only be spent on
open source software solutions.  If the source code of your application is
not freely available on the internet, then I don't want my gov't paying you
to advance it.  I wonder how much of our tax dollars the US gov't spends on
MS products each year?  Now that sounds like a crime to me!!!!" (Dusty)

Hear hear!  With all due respect to the quality of the institutions, it
should also be unacceptable for MIT, Stanford, UH, whomever..., to take
public money and spin it into private patents.  And not just for software.
Guys like Metcalf get us both ways- we pay taxes to support ethernet
development and then pay to purchase it.  Worse, we then have to listen to
them gloat about what great business people they are!

In my own field, linguistics, projects commonly take public funds and public
resources and spin them into proprietary lexicons and grammars.  I
personally argue for 'public domain-ing' of all developments produced by
public research institutions.  I also work to develop public language
resources.

I personally argue in my dissertation that all academic and scientific
software should be open.  Why?  Because it is ethically correct? Sure, but
open software is also essential to scientific inquiry.  Without open
software you can't _really_ have experimental reproducibility, a foundation
of academic responsibility.  One simply cannot trust analytic results if the
method cannot be validated; those compelling statistics may just be a bug.

And yet open software in science is pretty rare.  Flip through some journals
most fields with computational information processing; the common case is
that findings cannot be validated because the software is proprietary.  I
hope the tide turns before I need to rely on some newly minted medicine or
prothesis.

And if anyone is interested in GPL'd language analysis software, now you
know who to call.

aloha-
Rod Gammon
____________________________________________

President, AEG, Inc.     | PhD. Candidate
Tools for multi-lingual  | Chinese Computational Linguistics
information processing.  | University of HI @ Manoa
http://www.aeg-inc.net   | http://www.aeg-inc.net/cuttingEdge