On Wed, Feb 19, 2003, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Re: need tool for high quality typesetting, unicode-capable": > Of course, I don't know how many of these projects are of actual > substantial worth. Some labs give exactly the same project semester after
They are usually of near-zero substantial worth unfortunately. Just like the homework I did while studying math was rarely (if ever!) worth publication. It was usually just repeating what was already done N+1 times in the past, and many times - badly. I was talking about major projects taking several experienced people (like professors and graduate students) and spanning years, not about something a single completely inexperienced person does in two days (or even two weeks) of effort. > In any case, the reason openMosix was forked (in part by Israelis) was > because Prof. Amnon Barak does not accept patches to it from the outside. This is a valid reason for forking, exactly like it is valid for me to declare "NYH Linux" based on Linux with a few patches I wrote and which Linus refused to enter into the official kernel. What is not ok, however, is to go around saying that my version is "Open Linux" because Linus's is closed. It's simply not fair. Especially when you do it to one of the "good guys" (like Prof. Barak or Linus Torvalds). > That said, I believe that software that is developed inside universities > and not released to the public is not a good or advisable thing. It is > possible that it technically legal. In the U.S. there's the issue of the > stanford checker, which was used to find some bugs in the Linux kernel, > but has otherwise not been made available in source or binary forms. The tradition in Universities has always been to publish their results, *and* give enough information in that publication for the readers to be able to replicate the work, and build on it. Does it sound like free software, where you have to publish both the binary *and* the source code needed to replicate this work and build on it? It sure does! But unfortunately some researchers have a different take on this. They think that contrary to the text of the GPL, nobody ever said that the information a university researcher publishes has to be the "most convenient" way to replicate their work. So they don't publish source-code, but only a brief description of what they done. Their "competitors" (other researchers in the same field) can repeat their work, but it will take them months of work, rather than 5 minutes to get started. The researchers that do that probably think that they are still following the university procedures while giving themselves a competitive edge, and they are right, actually. But I think while they are following the procedures, they are not following the spirit for which Universities we designed. You might compare this situation to university departments that have expensive tangible property, like expensive physics measurement devices, an expensive super-computer, a very good library of ancient scrolls, etc. Such "property" gives this university a competitive edge, attracting good researchers and more funds to it. Having such property is good for the University, so the regents of the university probably like it. For some departments, software can actually play the role of such property, so perhaps it's understandable why Universities don't really mind (to say the least) when their researchers keep software hidden. And it certainly doesn't help that certain American univerisities got stakes in high-profile software patents (e.g., see Akamai), so they become greedy and try to capitalize on the research their people are doing, instead of telling them to go ahead and share their work with the world. -- Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, Feb 19 2003, 18 Adar I 5763 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog http://nadav.harel.org.il |vendor? Make me one with everything. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
