Josselin Mouette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Le vendredi 22 juin 2007 à 14:20 -0400, Zachary Palmer a écrit : >> This software package has pretty much the best reason for >> being closed source that I've encountered; they want to prevent >> falsified results from damaging the research. > > This is probably one of the worst excuses I could find. The software > being closed source doesn't prevent *AT ALL* any kind falsification. > Relying on such a blatantly wrong security scheme is the best way to > discover falsification too late.
As I understood it, the idea was more to keep information *comparable*, which wouldn't be the case if someone "improved" the script by using a faster minimizer, linking against an improved libfoo or whatever. You simply cannot publish a work based on "input which clients sent to us that are somehow more or less the same as what we describe in the methods section", it needs to match exactly what's in the methods section. It's not a means against evil attackers, but against goodwilling "helpers". By the way, I seem to recall that I once interacted, as a potential sponsor, with someone who wanted to upload a package similar to that proposed by Zachary, and it was called "fah". I would even tend to think that there was a version in the archive, but I'm not sure I ever uploaded something (I remember arguments with the sponsee about the maintainer scripts). I'm currently offline and therefore cannot verify it, it should be (partly) in the -mentors archive. Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
