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Comment by inimino | Hacker News Reader

> Free software isn't about making data openly available.

You must be allowed to redistribute the software, and you must be allowed to get, modify, and redistribute the code. Binaries and code are data.

Maybe what you mean is that the biologists' and x-ray crystallographers' journals developed their push for data access independently of the free software movement, but it's a stretch to say that access to the data that a programmer creates and access to the data that a biologist creates have nothing in common.

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"Allowed to" is not the same as "required to."

Open science people generally want people who publish papers to be required to publish the data. This might be in a public repository, or with the journal, and if there is a fee, that fee should effectively only cover cost.

Stallman's conception of free software says that you should be able to charge as much as you want. Hence, these are different concepts.

What I mean is that the statement in the original comment, "Now chemists and biologists have started talking about making data openly available and so forth" is wrong. Chemists and biologists "started talking about" this decades ago. The evidence I showed is that it was no later than 1987. It's almost certainly older - I just happened to read about this example.

I'm not saying they have nothing in common. I'm reacting to the hyperbole in the idea that the free software movement was instrumental to "the paradigmatic changes in how science itself is done".

Well, when you purchase GPL licensed software, the author is required to supply you also with the source code, and you must be allowed to redistribute this (under terms and conditions.)

Sure, there are distinctive features for each domain, but in broad strokes, I don't see the above description as very different from the one following:

When you purchase access to an open-data paper, the author is required to supply you also with the raw data, and you must be allowed to redistribute this (under terms and conditions.)

"when you purchase GPL" .. sure.

But there's nothing to force me to provide you with the software until you've given me money. Even if I used someone else's GPL'ed software in my software, I can simply not distribute it until someone gives me $100,000.

"When you purchase access to an open-data paper"

Some provisos first. Some papers are gratis, and don't require being purchased. (Eg, author-pays papers.) Also, I think you are defining "open-data paper" that way, making your argument a bit tautological.

Those aside, I'm pointing out that the "open-data paper" movement started independently and likely co-temporally, if not earlier than, the free software movement.

> I can simply not distribute it

Of course, you haven't infringed on anyone's freedom yet, there are no users. I guess the thing is if you massively overcharge without providing any corresponding service of value the first person that purchases it has the option to throw the source code up on the internet and it can be forked.

I guess you also have to find a buyer that is willing to pay you the large sum while also knowing they can't charge others for it without also handing over the source code, so it's doubtful anyone would do so.

There are other options though, if a single person or entity owns the copyright for the entire code base, with no outside contributors, they can dual license it. GPL for the public and then commercial proprietary license for businesses. That way the business can build on it if they wish without redistributing the source.

Exactly! I am free to talk about it, boast about it, write papers about it, etc.

While, to go back to my first comment:

"If you have useful data, the free software principles say that you might as well charge a lot of money for it, which is not what most chemists and biologists think of in discussion of data openness."

If you have useful data, you might as well get a big research grant to publish it. If the buyer (in this case the government or university) were to demand reproducibility, this would cost more, because reproducibility takes work, and it would be worth more; overall scientific progress would accelerate, because reproduction with variation (sounds familiar) has value.

> Stallman's conception of free software says that you should be able to charge as much as you want.

Yes, he was referring to the service of duplicating and mailing tapes pre-Internet. You seem to have mistaken that for a key philosophical issue of some kind, when it's secondary.

> reacting to the hyperbole

I worked for national labs back in the day. Every dept. wrote their own terminal applications, plotting programs, etc. which consumed serious grant budgets. Free and open source software has been a huge boon to science. The most important? GCC and family. Second is probably Linux, which is GPL. See a pattern yet?

It really sounds like you need a history lesson on the FSF, because you're way off base.

Really? Because I think it is part of the key philosophy of free software.

Consider #1: I think of an improvement to gcc. I get a copy of the gcc source, modify it, and prove to my satisfaction that it works.

I stop at that point, intellectually satiated, tell a few friends, and don't release any software (source or binary).

The principles of free software say that I am not forced to release any changes. I am not even obligated to send improvements upstream.

Am I wrong about this?

Consider #2: The same as above, but I know that Yoyodyne could save $1 million per year with my improvements. I don't tell them. The free software principles say that I have no obligation to tell them.

Am I wrong about this?

Consider #3: The same as above, but I go to Yoyodyne and say that I'll sell my gcc modification to them - under the GPL - for $250,000. They of course can then redistribute those changes, including back to mainline.

Is that contrary to any free software principle? I don't think so, according to my years of reading the history of the FSF and the free software movement.

But, suppose you are correct, and Stallman's essay only applies to "the service of duplicating and mailing tapes pre-Internet". If so, there's a simple workaround:

Consider #4: I have the idea, implement it, and distribute it to a single organization - a tape duplicating service - and it's that organization which sells the software to Yoyodyne, for $300,000, of which $250,000 comes back to me. (My brother just happens to run the tape service.)

Is that against the principles of free software, and if so, how?

I don't think Stallman's "selling free software" essay was meant to be so easy to work around.

Just because free software is generally distributed at no price or "reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source" (quoting GPLv3), doesn't make it the same as saying that there's an free software principle which obligates that.

While the open data movement in science does have the principle that the data should be free, or should only cover the "reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of" data.

How am I off base?

I don't think you are. Trade secrets aren't covered by GPL except in the case of v3 on software accessed through a terminal. Even in this essay, he makes clear than open patents aren't the same as Free Software.

That being said, the Free Software movement was obviosly seminal in all of the open data talk, and for that matter open patent talk; it's not the same thing, but a strong and heavily influential idea in one context inspires analogues in other contexts. I think your overall point is wrong, although I think your supporting point is completely correct.

You're not wrong, however... if you sell the software, you're obligated to provide source. A better analogy would be if you publish the paper, you're obligated to release your data. Nobody ever suggested that individuals or companies can't do private research at all. You just shouldn't be able to have it both ways. If you want the credit, show your work.

Yes, that analogy is the argument in open data.

My argument is that that analogy doesn't follow from free software principles.

If it did, then it would follow that if you publish the paper, you're obligated to release your source.

And we don't see that coming out of the free software movement. We do see that coming out of the open data/open science movement.

Yes, if you publish, you're required to release everything necessary for a practitioner reasonably skilled in the art to reproduce your results, without undue effort. For example, releasing a tarball of source code missing the Makefile that runs the arcane build process is not within the spirit of free software and you will be soundly ridiculed and if GPL is involved may be sued. Dumping a database that, together with your paper, still requires n > 1 grad-student-years of effort to reproduce is not really open science, although it's a huge step up from Elsevier. Is this broadly understood? Probably not, but it is at least well known by some. Honestly, free software people have been working out these "reproducibility" issues in practice for decades before the biologists even got on the bus.

Free software is only concerned with software.

If you publish your software, you are required to release everything needed to develop it further, yes.

However, if you publish your paper, you are not required, under the free software principles.

If I am wrong, show me where the FSF/GNU say that.

I believe your argument is that there's a clear parallel to publishing a paper and publishing the software.

However, there's also a clear parallel to, say, publishing an internet service based on free software, and publishing the software. This lead to the AGPL.

The GPL does not have that requirement, which means it isn't a free software principle. It could have - I think I've heard Eben Moglen say it was discussed early on. But if so, then having a telnet server, or ftp server, or anything reacting to the network, would require the ability to download the source.

> free software people have been working out these "reproducibility" issues in practice for decades before the biologists even got on the bus.

While biologists were working out other "reproducibility" issues long before there were buses.

You're correct about FSF/GNU having narrow focus. Also that the GPL doesn't say anything about what biologists can't publish. Analogically we can make the arguments but we can't attribute these arguments to the FSF. Whether the west coast hackers influenced the open access science movements -- it's obvious that they did, this is not all post hoc parallels that everyone missed at the time.

Your #4, by the way, is basically the "bounty" model of open source funding, and is not unheard of. For example, Blender was open sourced this way.

> Open science people generally want people who publish papers to be required to publish the data.

Free software requires that if you publish (or sell) binaries you MUST release the source as well, with full rights to modify and redistribute.

You are not required to publish, just as you are not required to release software.

> Stallman's conception of free software says that you should be able to charge as much as you want.

Yes, once. After this your first customer is now free to undercut you and bring the price as close to zero as they like, as is their first customer, etc.

The analogy is: you can charge Nature as much as you want for the rights to publish your paper, but when you do, you have to give them the raw data, in replication-ready form, which they will then publish to anyone they sell the journal to. And Nature's customer is in turn allowed to republish and if they do is required to again make the source data available.

I think you're reading more than is warranted into rms selling some emacs tapes by mail order back in the day.

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