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
