23 ms·

> it's substantially more work to clean and organize the code for publishing, it will increase the surface for nitpicking and criticism (e.g. coding style, etc)

by del82 5y ago

> it's substantially more work to clean and organize the code for publishing, it will increase the surface for nitpicking and criticism (e.g. coding style, etc). Matt Might has a solution for this that I love: Don't clean & organize! Release it under the CRAPL[0], making explicit what everyone understands, viz.: "Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it into running; and it's not pretty code. Academic code is about 'proof of concept.'" [0] https://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/ https://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/

rubyist5eva 5y ago
You don't need an esoteric license, just use a standard license like MIT> relevant section from MIT license: "THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE."
gwd 5y ago
> Don't clean & organize! FWIW I basically did this: My thesis numbers were run on a branch based on the unstable version of an upstream project that was going through a major refactoring. I took a tarball of the VCS tree at that point in time and posted it online. Over the years 3-4 people have asked for the tarball; nobody has ever come back to me with any more questions. I can only assume they gave up trying to make it work in despair. I think I tried to build it a couple of years ago, and it wouldn't even build because gcc has gotten a lot more strict than it used to be (and the upstream project has -Werror, so any warnings break the compilation). I think it's definitely worth doing, but I think you need to be realistic about how much impact that kind of "publishing" is really going to have.
beckman466 5y ago
> Matt Might has a solution for this that I love: Don't clean & organize! Release it under the CRAPL[0] > "Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it into running; and it's not pretty code. Academic code is about 'proof of concept.'" This is brilliant! edit: it seems that, aside from that great snippet from the text, the license itself isn't so great. another comment [1] has a great analysis of the actual license and suggests using a superior solution (copying the preamble part yet still using MIT/(A)GPL). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937180
carterschonwald 5y ago
A thousand times this. A working demonstrator of a useful idea that is honest about its limits is so valuable. Mover over most commercial code is garbage! :)
- ur-whale 5y ago
  Please do absolutely publish your code. If only to help people who simply can't read academic papers because it's not a language their brain is wired to parse, but who can read code and will understand your ideas via that medium. [EDIT]: to go further, I have - more than once - run research code under a debugger (or printf-instrumented it, whichever) to finally be able to get an actual intuitive grasp of the idea presented in the paper. Once you stare at the actual variables while the code runs, my experience is it speaks to you in a way no equation ever will.
archontes 5y ago
I'd like to piggyback and say that increasing the surface for nitpicking and criticism is exactly why OP should release his code. It improves the world's ability to map data to the phenomenon being observed. It becomes auditable. Certainly don't clean it up unless you're going to repeat the experiment with the cleaned up code.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Agreed on both points! As somebody who bridges research and production code, I can typically clean code faster than I can read & understand it. It really helps to have a known-good (or known-"good") example so that I can verify that my cleanup isn't making undesired changes. And, yeah. I've found some significant mistakes in research code -- authors have always been grateful that I saved them from the public embarrassment.
galgalesh 5y ago
I do this with my code and can highly recommend it. Supplying bad code is a lot more valuable than supplying no code. Also in my experience, reviewers won't actually review your code, even though they like it a lot when you supply it.
armchairhacker 5y ago
Anecdotally most of the research papers I see and have worked on publish their code but don't really clean it up. Even papers by big companies like Microsoft Research. Still significantly better than not publishing the code at all.
LandR 5y ago
> "Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it into running; and it's not pretty code. Academic code is about 'proof of concept.'" What do you know, it turns out the professional software developers I work with are actually scientists and academics!!
- paulluuk 5y ago
  They don't call it "Computer Science" for nothing ;)
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    notoriously Philip Wadler says that computer science has two problems: computer and science. It's not about computers and "You don't put science on your name if you're a real science" He prefers the name informatics. source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IOiZatlZtGU https://youtube.com/watch?v=IOiZatlZtGU
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      An economist friend of mine told me that once, so this isn't just a CS quip.
    - dmlorenzetti 5y ago
      You don't put science on your name if you're a real science Having flashbacks to when a close friend was getting an MS in Political Science, and spent the first semester in a class devoted to whether or not political science is a science.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
        Well? Don't keep us hanging.
    - wisemang 5y ago
      Kinda like countries that feel the need to put “democratic” in their name.
goodpoint 5y ago
This is not what licenses are for!! They are not statements about the quality of your work or anything similar. Use standard and well understood licenses e.g. GPL for code and CC for documentation. The world does not need more license fragmentation.
- ur-whale 5y ago
  > This is not what licenses are for!! You must be fun at parties :)
- jll29 5y ago
  For instance, the Java license explicitly forbids the use in/for real-time critical systems, and such limitations are good to stress in a license so that they may reach legal force, also to protect the author(s). Incidentally, I've seen people violate the Java "no realtime" clause.
  - jerven 5y ago
    Used to, OpenJDK is licensened under GPLv2 with the classpath excemption that allows this for years. If not running an OpenJDK build it depends on your vendor license.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    And it makes the license non-opensource. Plus, the usual "no warranty" is strong enough to protect the authors anyways.
- skrebbel 5y ago
  This has explicit usage limitations that matter in science land, which is very much the kind of thing that belongs in a license. Eg: You are permitted to use the Program to validate scientific claims submitted for peer review, under the condition that You keep modifications to the Program confidential until those claims have been published. Moreover, sure, lots of the license is text that isn't common in legal documents, but there's no rule that says legal text can't be quirky, funny or superfluous. It's just most practical to keep it dry. In this particular case, however, there's very little risk of actual law suits happening. There is some, but the real goal of the license is not to protect anyone's ass in court (except for the obvious "no warranty" part at the end), but to clearly communicate intent. Don't forget that this is something GPL and MIT also do besides their obvious "will likely stand up in court" qualities. In fact I think that communicating intent is the key goal of GPL and MIT, and also the key goal of CRAPL. From this perspective, IMO the only problem in this license is By reading this sentence, You have agreed to the terms and conditions of this License. This line makes me sad because it makes a mockery of what's otherwise a pretty decent piece of communication. Obviously nobody can agree to anything just by reading a sentence in it. It should say that by using the source code in any way, you must agree to the license.
oolonthegreat 5y ago
lol didn't know about this license, amazing!
zitterbewegung 5y ago
I think this could be done much better by putting a very restrictive license like GPLv3 / AGPL and then in the README putting in that I don't support this project at all and ignore everything associated with wherever you are hosting it. Using this license would actually make me suspect that your results aren't even valid and I don't trust many experiments that don't release source code.
- HenrikB 5y ago
  In case OP, and others don't know, it is the copyright holders that can decide on the license. Copyright holders are the persons who contributed to the code. In this case, it sounds like OP is the sole author and therefore the sole copyright holder. You cannot change the past, but as a copyright holder, you can always set a new license for future releases. Thus, OP, if you're uncertain, I definitely was when I started out, go with a restrive license as recommended here (GPL). That, together with publishing the code online (e.g. GitHub, Gitlab, ...) as well as a with your article, will give you some protection against plagiarism. Anyone who use include parts of your code for their research code, will have to share theirs code the same. If you later on feel like you want to relax the license, you can always change it to, say, MIT.
bee_rider 5y ago
I like it so far, other than 4) You recognize that any request for support for the Program will be discarded with extreme prejudice. I think that should be a "may" rather than a "will." If I find out someone is using my obscure academic code, and they ask for help, I'd be pretty pumped to help them (on easy requests at least).
- inanutshellus 5y ago
  The point of the license is to set your expectations as low as possible. Then, when you actually /do/ get support, you'll be ecstatic rather than non-plussed.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Discarding a request for support with extreme prejudice might entail using LinkedIn to look up the boss of the person who asked you for support, then phoning them up to complain about the request for support, or it might entail filing for a restraining order against the person requestings support. The point of this clause is to intimidate people out of making the request in the first place.
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      That's a pretty over the top reading.
      - kragen 5y ago
        You should probably familiarize yourself with the meaning of the phrases it's alluding to, "dismissed with extreme prejudice" and "terminated with extreme prejudice".
  - leksak 5y ago
    When phrased like this, > 4) You recognize that any request for support for the Program will be discarded with extreme prejudice. There is no way I'd even make a request for support.
jandrese 5y ago
Yes, if you feel you have to make it "release ready" then you'll never publish it. I'm pretty sure a good majority of the code is never released because the original author is ashamed of it, but they shouldn't be. Everybody is in the same boat. The only thing I would add is a description of the build environment and an example of how to use it.
rectang 5y ago
The CRAPL is a "crayon license" — a license drafted by an amateur that is unclear and so will prevent downstream use by anyone for whom legal rigor of licensing is important. https://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/ https://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/ > I'm not a lawyer, so I doubt I've written the CRAPL in such a way that it would hold up well in court. Please do release your code, but please use a standard open source license. As for which one, look to what your peers use.
vngzs 5y ago
Please don't use this license. Copy the language from the preamble and put it in your README if you'd like, but the permissions granted are so severely restricted as to make this license essentially useless for anything besides "validation of scientific claims." It's not an open-source license - if someone wished to include code from CRAPL in their MIT-licensed program, the license does not grant them the permission to do so. Nor does it grant permission for "general use" - the software might not be legally "suitable for any purpose," but it should be the user's choice to decide if they want to use the software for something that isn't validation of scientific claims. I am not a lawyer, just a hardcore open-source advocate in a former life.
- vimax 5y ago
  While I whole heatedly agree with you, I would seriously question anyone trying to reuse research code in production without completely reimplementing it from scratch.
- LamaOfRuin 5y ago
  From the post: "The CRAPL says nothing about copyright ownership or permission to commercialize. You'll have to attach another license if you want to classically open source your software." It is explicitly the point of the license that the code is not for those purposes, because it's shitty code that should not be reused in any real code base.
  - kragen 5y ago
    That's not a good excuse for putting your readers at legal risk of copyright infringement. A real, non-shitty code base could easily be a "derivative work" of the shitty code.
- caconym_ 5y ago
  Yeah, this seems a bit verbose and overbearing to me. The open-source licenses I've used myself include something like this, which seems quite sufficient: > THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. From a non-academic's point of view I might include a brief disclaimer in the README too, explaining the context for the code and why it's in the state it's in, but there's no obligation to hold the user's hand. To be frank, anybody nitpicking or criticizing code released under these circumstances with the expectation that the author do something about it can go fuck themselves. Competitive advantage, on the other hand, is a perfectly valid reason to hold code back. There may also be some cost in academia to opening an attack surface for any sort of criticism, even irrelevant criticism made in obvious bad faith. Based on what I've heard about academia, this wouldn't surprise me.
bmitc 5y ago
> Academic code is about "proof of concept." Why does he think that but presumably not the same about the paper itself and the “equations”, plots, etc. contained within? It’s really not that hard to write pretty good code for prototypes. In fact, I can only assume that he and other professors never allowed or encouraged “proof of concept” code to be submitted as course homework or projects.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  I think you don't understand the realities of work in scientific/academic organisations. Unless you work in computer science you likely never received any formal education on programming except for some numerical methods in c/matlab/fortran course during your studies (which often also focus more on the numerical methods and not the programming). So pretty much every person, just learned by doing. Moreover you are not being paid for writing reasonable programs you're paid for doing science. Nobody would submit "prototype" papers, because they are the currency of academic work. There is lots of time spend on polishing a paper before submission, but doing that for code is generally not appreciated because nobody will see this on your CV.
  - bmitc 5y ago
    I understand it fine. Like I said, it’s really not that hard to write pretty good code for prototypes. I'm not saying the code needs to be architected for scale or performance or whatever else needless expectation. I don't have a formal education in programming or computer science and write clean code just fine, as do some other non-computer science people I've worked with in advanced R&D contexts. And then some (many?) don't. It's not really about educational background, it's more about just being organized. Even when someone is "just" doing science, a lot of times, the code explicitly defines what's going on and has major impacts on the results. (Not to mention that plenty of people with computer science backgrounds write horrible code.) If code is a large part of your scientific work, then it's just as important as someone who does optics keeping their optics table organized and designed well. If one is embarrassed by that, then too bad. Embarrassment is how we learn. Lastly, you're describing problems with the academic world as if they are excuses. They're reasons but most people know the academic world is not perfect, especially with what is prioritized and essentially gamified.
kube-system 5y ago
MIT and BSD are established and well accepted licenses, literally named after the academic institutions where they originated. Licenses are legal documents, part of what makes them "explicit what everyone understands" is their legally recognized establishment. If you want to set expectations, this can simply be done in a README. Putting this in a license makes no sense. Copyright licenses grant exceptions to copyright law. If you're adding something else to it, you're muddying the water, not making it better.
woah 5y ago
I'm not a scientist so maybe I don't get it, but it seems like code could be analogized to a chemist's laboratory (roughly). If a chemist published pictures of their lab setup in their paper, and it turned out that they were using dirty glassware, paper cups instead of beakers, duct taping joints, etc etc, wouldn't that cast some doubt on their results? They would be getting "nitpicked" but would it be unfair? Maybe their result would be reproducible regardless of their sloppy practices, but until then I would be more skeptical than I would be of a clean and orderly lab.

by del82 5y ago

rubyist5eva 5y ago

You don't need an esoteric license, just use a standard license like MIT> relevant section from MIT license: "THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE."

gwd 5y ago

> Don't clean & organize! FWIW I basically did this: My thesis numbers were run on a branch based on the unstable version of an upstream project that was going through a major refactoring. I took a tarball of the VCS tree at that point in time and posted it online. Over the years 3-4 people have asked for the tarball; nobody has ever come back to me with any more questions. I can only assume they gave up trying to make it work in despair. I think I tried to build it a couple of years ago, and it wouldn't even build because gcc has gotten a lot more strict than it used to be (and the upstream project has -Werror, so any warnings break the compilation). I think it's definitely worth doing, but I think you need to be realistic about how much impact that kind of "publishing" is really going to have.

beckman466 5y ago

> Matt Might has a solution for this that I love: Don't clean & organize! Release it under the CRAPL[0] > "Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it into running; and it's not pretty code. Academic code is about 'proof of concept.'" This is brilliant! edit: it seems that, aside from that great snippet from the text, the license itself isn't so great. another comment [1] has a great analysis of the actual license and suggests using a superior solution (copying the preamble part yet still using MIT/(A)GPL). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937180

carterschonwald 5y ago

A thousand times this. A working demonstrator of a useful idea that is honest about its limits is so valuable. Mover over most commercial code is garbage! :)

ur-whale 5y ago
Please do absolutely publish your code. If only to help people who simply can't read academic papers because it's not a language their brain is wired to parse, but who can read code and will understand your ideas via that medium. [EDIT]: to go further, I have - more than once - run research code under a debugger (or printf-instrumented it, whichever) to finally be able to get an actual intuitive grasp of the idea presented in the paper. Once you stare at the actual variables while the code runs, my experience is it speaks to you in a way no equation ever will.

archontes 5y ago

I'd like to piggyback and say that increasing the surface for nitpicking and criticism is exactly why OP should release his code. It improves the world's ability to map data to the phenomenon being observed. It becomes auditable. Certainly don't clean it up unless you're going to repeat the experiment with the cleaned up code.

klyrs 5y ago
Agreed on both points! As somebody who bridges research and production code, I can typically clean code faster than I can read & understand it. It really helps to have a known-good (or known-"good") example so that I can verify that my cleanup isn't making undesired changes. And, yeah. I've found some significant mistakes in research code -- authors have always been grateful that I saved them from the public embarrassment.

galgalesh 5y ago

I do this with my code and can highly recommend it. Supplying bad code is a lot more valuable than supplying no code. Also in my experience, reviewers won't actually review your code, even though they like it a lot when you supply it.

armchairhacker 5y ago

Anecdotally most of the research papers I see and have worked on publish their code but don't really clean it up. Even papers by big companies like Microsoft Research. Still significantly better than not publishing the code at all.

LandR 5y ago

> "Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it into running; and it's not pretty code. Academic code is about 'proof of concept.'" What do you know, it turns out the professional software developers I work with are actually scientists and academics!!

paulluuk 5y ago
They don't call it "Computer Science" for nothing ;)
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  notoriously Philip Wadler says that computer science has two problems: computer and science. It's not about computers and "You don't put science on your name if you're a real science" He prefers the name informatics. source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IOiZatlZtGU https://youtube.com/watch?v=IOiZatlZtGU
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    An economist friend of mine told me that once, so this isn't just a CS quip.
  - dmlorenzetti 5y ago
    You don't put science on your name if you're a real science Having flashbacks to when a close friend was getting an MS in Political Science, and spent the first semester in a class devoted to whether or not political science is a science.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
      Well? Don't keep us hanging.
  - wisemang 5y ago
    Kinda like countries that feel the need to put “democratic” in their name.

goodpoint 5y ago

This is not what licenses are for!! They are not statements about the quality of your work or anything similar. Use standard and well understood licenses e.g. GPL for code and CC for documentation. The world does not need more license fragmentation.

ur-whale 5y ago
> This is not what licenses are for!! You must be fun at parties :)
jll29 5y ago
For instance, the Java license explicitly forbids the use in/for real-time critical systems, and such limitations are good to stress in a license so that they may reach legal force, also to protect the author(s). Incidentally, I've seen people violate the Java "no realtime" clause.
- jerven 5y ago
  Used to, OpenJDK is licensened under GPLv2 with the classpath excemption that allows this for years. If not running an OpenJDK build it depends on your vendor license.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  And it makes the license non-opensource. Plus, the usual "no warranty" is strong enough to protect the authors anyways.
skrebbel 5y ago
This has explicit usage limitations that matter in science land, which is very much the kind of thing that belongs in a license. Eg: You are permitted to use the Program to validate scientific claims submitted for peer review, under the condition that You keep modifications to the Program confidential until those claims have been published. Moreover, sure, lots of the license is text that isn't common in legal documents, but there's no rule that says legal text can't be quirky, funny or superfluous. It's just most practical to keep it dry. In this particular case, however, there's very little risk of actual law suits happening. There is some, but the real goal of the license is not to protect anyone's ass in court (except for the obvious "no warranty" part at the end), but to clearly communicate intent. Don't forget that this is something GPL and MIT also do besides their obvious "will likely stand up in court" qualities. In fact I think that communicating intent is the key goal of GPL and MIT, and also the key goal of CRAPL. From this perspective, IMO the only problem in this license is By reading this sentence, You have agreed to the terms and conditions of this License. This line makes me sad because it makes a mockery of what's otherwise a pretty decent piece of communication. Obviously nobody can agree to anything just by reading a sentence in it. It should say that by using the source code in any way, you must agree to the license.

oolonthegreat 5y ago

lol didn't know about this license, amazing!

zitterbewegung 5y ago

I think this could be done much better by putting a very restrictive license like GPLv3 / AGPL and then in the README putting in that I don't support this project at all and ignore everything associated with wherever you are hosting it. Using this license would actually make me suspect that your results aren't even valid and I don't trust many experiments that don't release source code.

HenrikB 5y ago
In case OP, and others don't know, it is the copyright holders that can decide on the license. Copyright holders are the persons who contributed to the code. In this case, it sounds like OP is the sole author and therefore the sole copyright holder. You cannot change the past, but as a copyright holder, you can always set a new license for future releases. Thus, OP, if you're uncertain, I definitely was when I started out, go with a restrive license as recommended here (GPL). That, together with publishing the code online (e.g. GitHub, Gitlab, ...) as well as a with your article, will give you some protection against plagiarism. Anyone who use include parts of your code for their research code, will have to share theirs code the same. If you later on feel like you want to relax the license, you can always change it to, say, MIT.

bee_rider 5y ago

I like it so far, other than 4) You recognize that any request for support for the Program will be discarded with extreme prejudice. I think that should be a "may" rather than a "will." If I find out someone is using my obscure academic code, and they ask for help, I'd be pretty pumped to help them (on easy requests at least).

inanutshellus 5y ago
The point of the license is to set your expectations as low as possible. Then, when you actually /do/ get support, you'll be ecstatic rather than non-plussed.
- kragen 5y ago
  Discarding a request for support with extreme prejudice might entail using LinkedIn to look up the boss of the person who asked you for support, then phoning them up to complain about the request for support, or it might entail filing for a restraining order against the person requestings support. The point of this clause is to intimidate people out of making the request in the first place.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    That's a pretty over the top reading.
    - kragen 5y ago
      You should probably familiarize yourself with the meaning of the phrases it's alluding to, "dismissed with extreme prejudice" and "terminated with extreme prejudice".
- leksak 5y ago
  When phrased like this, > 4) You recognize that any request for support for the Program will be discarded with extreme prejudice. There is no way I'd even make a request for support.

jandrese 5y ago

Yes, if you feel you have to make it "release ready" then you'll never publish it. I'm pretty sure a good majority of the code is never released because the original author is ashamed of it, but they shouldn't be. Everybody is in the same boat. The only thing I would add is a description of the build environment and an example of how to use it.

rectang 5y ago

The CRAPL is a "crayon license" — a license drafted by an amateur that is unclear and so will prevent downstream use by anyone for whom legal rigor of licensing is important. https://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/ https://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/ > I'm not a lawyer, so I doubt I've written the CRAPL in such a way that it would hold up well in court. Please do release your code, but please use a standard open source license. As for which one, look to what your peers use.

vngzs 5y ago

Please don't use this license. Copy the language from the preamble and put it in your README if you'd like, but the permissions granted are so severely restricted as to make this license essentially useless for anything besides "validation of scientific claims." It's not an open-source license - if someone wished to include code from CRAPL in their MIT-licensed program, the license does not grant them the permission to do so. Nor does it grant permission for "general use" - the software might not be legally "suitable for any purpose," but it should be the user's choice to decide if they want to use the software for something that isn't validation of scientific claims. I am not a lawyer, just a hardcore open-source advocate in a former life.

vimax 5y ago
While I whole heatedly agree with you, I would seriously question anyone trying to reuse research code in production without completely reimplementing it from scratch.
LamaOfRuin 5y ago
From the post: "The CRAPL says nothing about copyright ownership or permission to commercialize. You'll have to attach another license if you want to classically open source your software." It is explicitly the point of the license that the code is not for those purposes, because it's shitty code that should not be reused in any real code base.
- kragen 5y ago
  That's not a good excuse for putting your readers at legal risk of copyright infringement. A real, non-shitty code base could easily be a "derivative work" of the shitty code.
caconym_ 5y ago
Yeah, this seems a bit verbose and overbearing to me. The open-source licenses I've used myself include something like this, which seems quite sufficient: > THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. From a non-academic's point of view I might include a brief disclaimer in the README too, explaining the context for the code and why it's in the state it's in, but there's no obligation to hold the user's hand. To be frank, anybody nitpicking or criticizing code released under these circumstances with the expectation that the author do something about it can go fuck themselves. Competitive advantage, on the other hand, is a perfectly valid reason to hold code back. There may also be some cost in academia to opening an attack surface for any sort of criticism, even irrelevant criticism made in obvious bad faith. Based on what I've heard about academia, this wouldn't surprise me.

bmitc 5y ago

> Academic code is about "proof of concept." Why does he think that but presumably not the same about the paper itself and the “equations”, plots, etc. contained within? It’s really not that hard to write pretty good code for prototypes. In fact, I can only assume that he and other professors never allowed or encouraged “proof of concept” code to be submitted as course homework or projects.

cycomanic 5y ago
I think you don't understand the realities of work in scientific/academic organisations. Unless you work in computer science you likely never received any formal education on programming except for some numerical methods in c/matlab/fortran course during your studies (which often also focus more on the numerical methods and not the programming). So pretty much every person, just learned by doing. Moreover you are not being paid for writing reasonable programs you're paid for doing science. Nobody would submit "prototype" papers, because they are the currency of academic work. There is lots of time spend on polishing a paper before submission, but doing that for code is generally not appreciated because nobody will see this on your CV.
- bmitc 5y ago
  I understand it fine. Like I said, it’s really not that hard to write pretty good code for prototypes. I'm not saying the code needs to be architected for scale or performance or whatever else needless expectation. I don't have a formal education in programming or computer science and write clean code just fine, as do some other non-computer science people I've worked with in advanced R&D contexts. And then some (many?) don't. It's not really about educational background, it's more about just being organized. Even when someone is "just" doing science, a lot of times, the code explicitly defines what's going on and has major impacts on the results. (Not to mention that plenty of people with computer science backgrounds write horrible code.) If code is a large part of your scientific work, then it's just as important as someone who does optics keeping their optics table organized and designed well. If one is embarrassed by that, then too bad. Embarrassment is how we learn. Lastly, you're describing problems with the academic world as if they are excuses. They're reasons but most people know the academic world is not perfect, especially with what is prioritized and essentially gamified.

kube-system 5y ago

MIT and BSD are established and well accepted licenses, literally named after the academic institutions where they originated. Licenses are legal documents, part of what makes them "explicit what everyone understands" is their legally recognized establishment. If you want to set expectations, this can simply be done in a README. Putting this in a license makes no sense. Copyright licenses grant exceptions to copyright law. If you're adding something else to it, you're muddying the water, not making it better.

woah 5y ago

I'm not a scientist so maybe I don't get it, but it seems like code could be analogized to a chemist's laboratory (roughly). If a chemist published pictures of their lab setup in their paper, and it turned out that they were using dirty glassware, paper cups instead of beakers, duct taping joints, etc etc, wouldn't that cast some doubt on their results? They would be getting "nitpicked" but would it be unfair? Maybe their result would be reproducible regardless of their sloppy practices, but until then I would be more skeptical than I would be of a clean and orderly lab.