More like "Should scientists be allowed to redact portions of their materials/methods chapters".
This isn't about the license, though asa separate issue I firmly believe that proprietary software is harmful to users' freedom and self-determination. Ignoring the liberty of scientists, is a piece of software were proprietary but the source code were available to all for inspection (which is *not* considered "open"), that would still be barely, slightly acceptable to the scientific process.
When the source code remains secret, then an entire section of the scientific process is sliced out of peer and piblic review, effectively a black box we're all supposed to trust. And, to replicate work, downstream scientists are also supposed to trust it, too.
Even when the workings of that black box are supposedly transparent ("It just pastes the sequences together!") it's as unacceptable to a scientific ethic as saying "I just extracted teh DNA": the methods matter to the scientific process and legacy.
So, yes: secret processes and methods have no place in science. Whether a crappy secret miniprep protocol or a crappy secret software platform.
...and if it's not secret, I still say reject if if it's proprietary, but that is a separate disussion riddled with human rights and general ethics questions, not a pure scientific process question.
While I like open source as much as anyone, I have to agree that it's kind of silly to say that closed source software has no place in science. Should scientists be disallowed from using Windows? If you are doing processing of the sequence (e.g. A multiple sequence alignment) then it's important to know the math that goes into it, but it doesn't really matter if they don't tell you the way that they render the graphical drawings of a plasmid.
On Sat, Apr 16, 2016, 5:20 PM Jake <jakestew@mail.com> wrote:> Open is crucial. Secret-innards software has no value to me and has no place in the scientific process.--I'd counter that an exaggerated sense of entitlement and open bigotry like this have no place in science.When someone takes the time and effort to create something for you to use for free, you have no business criticizing the author's choice of license to release it under. Nobody's forcing you to use it. To go so far as to then insult them by saying they have no place in science is really offensive. Having such poor manners is what really has no place in science, and you will go nowhere in it with that attitude.
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