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I really don't like seeing people advocate using this license or any other non-free license. The whole point of making analysis code available is to aid reprod

I really don't like seeing people advocate using this license or any other non-free license. The whole point of making analysis code available is to aid reproducibility and future research, but this license explicitly forbids reuse of code for anything other than peer review or validation.

JesperRavn 11y ago
Good catch. Academia seems like the strangest place for people to be especially possessive over the IP they produce, since the actual knowledge the produce is generally intended to be shared freely and used for any purpose. And yet academia seems to push for patents for their ideas (admittedly these ideas tend to be less obvious than the patents coming from industry) and non-commercial licenses for their software. I think it's time for academia to reevaluate what their purpose is, and whether sharing software and implementation details should be considered as essential as sharing ideas. I personally think that academia should use permissive licenses, since they are primarily funded by the government, and so the software should be available to all without restriction, just as scientific knowledge is. But I guess that depends on your views on software "freedom" (which I characterize as the belief in natural right to modify and copy software that one owns).
- ngoldbaum 11y ago
  Another common weird academic license issue I've run into is people making up licenses to try to enforce academic norms about citations. Usually in these cases there will be a term in the license that requires a citation in any paper that gets written about data processed by the code. Since it make it legally questionable to use the code (what if I forget to cite them? Will they sue me?), fewer people will want to use it, making the whole exercise of publicly releasing the code less useful overall.
skybrian 11y ago
I think the idea is that the code is so crappy that they don't want people to do anything with it other than read it.

JesperRavn 11y ago

Good catch. Academia seems like the strangest place for people to be especially possessive over the IP they produce, since the actual knowledge the produce is generally intended to be shared freely and used for any purpose. And yet academia seems to push for patents for their ideas (admittedly these ideas tend to be less obvious than the patents coming from industry) and non-commercial licenses for their software. I think it's time for academia to reevaluate what their purpose is, and whether sharing software and implementation details should be considered as essential as sharing ideas. I personally think that academia should use permissive licenses, since they are primarily funded by the government, and so the software should be available to all without restriction, just as scientific knowledge is. But I guess that depends on your views on software "freedom" (which I characterize as the belief in natural right to modify and copy software that one owns).

ngoldbaum 11y ago
Another common weird academic license issue I've run into is people making up licenses to try to enforce academic norms about citations. Usually in these cases there will be a term in the license that requires a citation in any paper that gets written about data processed by the code. Since it make it legally questionable to use the code (what if I forget to cite them? Will they sue me?), fewer people will want to use it, making the whole exercise of publicly releasing the code less useful overall.

skybrian 11y ago

I think the idea is that the code is so crappy that they don't want people to do anything with it other than read it.