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User Comments on This Resource
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Comment By:
Jason E Stewart
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| 2001-09-19 08:10:51 |
| I invite any individuals who have suggestions on how we can best educate the public funding agencies about Open Source and Free Software to write them here, or to email them to the openinformatics-petition discussion list. |
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Comment By:
Jason E Stewart
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| 2001-09-23 15:35:24 |
| Thanks for the idea, Ewan. I've reactivate our resource mechanism, so now anyone can register an Open Source resource into our database. Please feel free to add any resources you find valuable. |
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Comment By:
Lucas R Chadwick
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| 2001-10-11 21:13:32 |
| I am not a computer scientist, but saw the article in Science. I believe it may help your cause to start compiling a list of case histories to present to the NSF.
A list of examples would be the best way to illustrate how some Universities will put profits before science. Why should the National *Science* Foundation uphold a policy that tends to slow the progress of science?
We all know that the person with the great ideas who does all the work will never see any financial returns anyway, no matter how long the lawyers spend arguing about contracts!
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Comment By:
Warren L DeLano
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| 2001-10-13 22:28:37 |
| An important first step is to demonstrate the value of unrestricted open-source software to biomedical research in a manner which appeals to both lay and scientific audiences. Compelling molecular graphics animations and images do this very well. PyMOL is a powerful new open-source tool for preparing such materials. I urge all open-source advocates to adopt the PyMOL Molecular Graphics System as both a useful tool and a publicly identifiable example of the startling benefits which open-source software can bring to biomedical research. PyMOL could not have originated at a public university given current policies on intellectual property. Instead, I had to invest my own private time and money AFTER leaving a public university in order to create it. Public funding agencies need to catalyze scientific progress by insisting upon universal availability of software developed using public funds. |
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Comment By:
Franco Tremolada
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| 2001-10-14 22:32:18 |
| Life, civilization and progress have been developing in time through incremental evolution. Let's kepp it the right way.
Science is growing incrementally.
Software evolution is a necessity to humanity like writing and reading. Let everybody take part. |
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Comment By:
Lucius Chiaraviglio
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| 2001-10-21 18:05:56 |
| This is an excellent proposal for 2
reasons: (1) full disclosure of data
and methods is required for proper
scientific investigation; (2) software
paid for by the taxpayers should be
freely and openly available to all of
the taxpayers. However, this proposal
should not be limited to software. It
should be extended to all scientific
tools paid for by the taxpayers. |
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Comment By:
richard k belew
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| 2001-10-28 18:29:26 |
| i am behind in my reading, and so only
getting to the 5 Oct 01 Science report
now. congratulations on your initiative,
and i only wish i'd seen it before the
trip that (just!) took me thru santa fe
and ABQ.
i am also extremely concerned about the
flow of science coming out of genomics,
and am spending my sabbatical year trying
to understand successes and failures of
OS efforts. i invite everyone interested
in this petition to review:
and let me know what you think!
rik
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Comment By:
Todd W Preato
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| 2001-11-17 19:03:06 |
| One of the benefits that the petition points out is the time savings to researchers using existing software. This, of course leads to the benefit that is most important to the funding sources: It makes the research cheaper. I don't think that this should be downplayed and possibly overlooked.
Todd |
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Comment By:
John C Obenauer
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| 2001-11-27 08:41:48 |
| Bioinformatics is young, and standards
regarding file/image formats will emerge
soon. Requiring publicly-funded software
to be open source will help establish
open standards. If the academic community
uses open formats (such as XML), commercial
software companies will need to follow
them to get customers. Many of us regret
letting proprietary Microsoft Word
documents become the de facto standard for exchanging formatted
text; let's avoid letting that happen again. |
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Comment By:
Alessandro Bottoni
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| 2002-01-04 07:55:35 |
| Let's extend this initiative to Europe and other countries. Public money should be spent for public benefit *worldwide*. |
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Comment By:
Wesley R Peters
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| 2002-01-06 17:39:58 |
| This issue should be at the top of the geek political agenda, in every country with significant government research funding.
As a citizen of the USA, I am stunned at my tax dollars being spent on basic research that ends up making millions of dollars for slick hucksters who take public funded research materials and turn them into products. If the public funded the research, the public should be given maximum benefit from the results.
This applies to computer software, biological and medical developments, and every other field of human knowlege. |
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Comment By:
Garrett J Moffitt
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| 2002-01-15 13:49:58 |
| I think all programs and source code purchased or developed with public funds should be available for public review, and use.
This is critical for future scientific progress for the following reasons:
1)It would be difficult for a researcher to have to continually review source code in conjunction with there research
2)Historically, private companies do not devote enough funnds for proper testing.
3)Research money is often scarce, and it should not be wasted buying/creating the same software over and over again.
4)Our government system relies to heavily on software vendors for there security and stability, and vendors have a monetarily gain by not creating good software, and only create software thats "good enough". |
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Comment By:
David Brownell
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| 2002-01-15 15:48:24 |
| As a tax payer, I do not want to be
seeing my taxes being used to subsidize
private corporations. The moral basis
for taxes has to do with maintaining
the public good, supporting and enhancing the commons. Any licence that supports private "confiscation" of goods produced using tax money is not moral. This is only
one of many kinds of "corporate welfare" (including in this situation academic bureaucracies) that should be stopped. |
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Comment By:
William B Cushman
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| 2002-01-15 16:26:51 |
| Open source software clearly benefits the most people at the least cost. In my field (manufacturing research) I am forced to use CAD-CAM programs that cost thousands of dollars. These expensive programs all have bugs, and there is no hope that the bugs will be fixed because then the user’s of these programs would not pay the outrageous “maintenance fees” and would not “upgrade.” “Bugs for Bucks” is an industry wide practice among commercial software vendors that costs the country dearly in lost production. As Linux and the BSDs have shown without equivocation, open source software is the only hope for developing software that actually works reliably, because the profit motive is removed. Government should encourage open source software development, and insisting that software developed at government expense be made public is a good way to do this. Government should not only insist that software that is developed with public funds be made public, but should also use nothing but open source software for its own everyday operations. Staroffice on Linux is a far more reliable and useable word processor than anything from Microsoft, and its free. Why then, does government buy Microsoft products? How many billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted in this manner? |
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Comment By:
Tommy Orndorff
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| 2002-01-15 18:49:10 |
| Right on brother. |
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Comment By:
Endres S Tribolet
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| 2002-01-15 19:23:45 |
| Privatization of public funded work means taxpayers who funded it don't have open access to what they funded, thus they pay twice - once to create it, second to use it once it is commercialized.
The flip-side is understandable:
Education is underfunded. Period.
My university now has to cut programs, enroll more students and pray after the State of Colorado said they are going to *take back* money that they had already given us. The all-SGI lab with Alias and Maya is now gone thanks to the loss of funding and the TABOR amendment.
In short, if the government funded education enough for the schools to pay all teachers a good salary, there would be no talk of this. In a way, you can't really blame the schools for wanting this. |
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Comment By:
Endres S Tribolet
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| 2002-01-15 19:23:45 |
| Privatization of public funded work means taxpayers who funded it don't have open access to what they funded, thus they pay twice - once to create it, second to use it once it is commercialized.
The flip-side is understandable:
Education is underfunded. Period.
My university now has to cut programs, enroll more students and pray after the State of Colorado said they are going to *take back* money that they had already given us. The all-SGI lab with Alias and Maya is now gone thanks to the loss of funding and the TABOR amendment.
In short, if the government funded education enough for the schools to pay all teachers a good salary, there would be no talk of this. In a way, you can't really blame the schools for wanting this. |
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Comment By:
william h hill jr
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| 2002-01-15 19:27:49 |
| What kind of public research uses secret tools? Who would trust the results of secret and unaudited code? |
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Comment By:
Luc Lefebvre
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| 2002-01-16 06:38:53 |
| I believe that all publicly funded scientific work should be open to peer review.
The tax payer funded the work, all should be able to benefit. If code was developed to achieve an end, it may be useful to others in the field and help it evolve more efficiently.
Why duplicate work at tax payer's expense? Let the public enjoy the full benefit of what they have paid for. |
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Comment By:
Thomas A Poe
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| 2002-03-10 15:26:21 |
| Hello: Good work being done with this. I wonder if any thought has been given to centralizing a listing of specific software that might be at issue. This, I think, will be important for legislators to know about. Just a thought, Thanks, Tom |
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Comment By:
richard k belew
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| 2002-08-31 20:44:11 |
| I think that this whole openinformatics idea is a step forward in current world. And so I would like to thank all the participating members and guests too! Thanks people! bramka sms |
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Comment By:
Kyle (TM) Amon (TM)
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| 2002-11-12 02:44:06 |
| When public funds are used to produce proprietary (non-public, non-free) software, the crime of theft is being committed against tax payers (the funders). |
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Comment By:
Kyle Amon
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| 2002-11-12 02:44:06 |
| When public funds are used to produce proprietary (non-public, non-free) software, the crime of theft is being committed against tax payers (the funders). |
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Comment By:
Russell W McOrmond
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| 2002-11-29 11:33:13 |
| I recently wrote an article in reply to one in "CANADA Research Horizons" which attempted to address this same issue.
An IP Ownership solution: Knowledge shared, knowledge gained
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Comment By:
Fangxia Li
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| 2003-02-12 13:53:14 |
| OSS is critical for anyone, both from biomedical background and software industry. Currently, one serious problem I identified is there is no common communication bridge to put people from both side working in the same boat. Most researchers know a little about how modern software really works; on the other hand, software engineer experiencing hard time to gain/understand what researchers really need.
My suggestion is, OSS should hold a central place to gain requirement, manage specification, and define data standards/protocols.
To adapt to dynamic changes in bio-data requirment, we need define a framework that would support these changes.
It looks for me that it is easy for bio-data researchers to programming around data (streamlining/procedure), but they would fail in whole framework design(system/object-oriented). If we still allow this happening, there is no way to manage bio-data in right way; people from both side would get bored very soon.
Join us into the highway! |
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Comment By:
richard k belew
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| 2003-04-22 10:15:07 |
Good work being done with this. I wonder if any thought has been given to centralizing a listing of specific software that might be at issue. This, I think, will be important for legislators to know about.
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Comment By:
richard k belew
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| 2003-04-22 10:18:22 |
think that this whole openinformatics idea is a step forward in current world. And so I would like to thank all the participating members and guests too! Thanks people!
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