One of my editors at somepoint, told me that he had asked his lawyers
about this (i.e. don't think this is anything like real legal advice),
and the answer was 'If you publish an article and advise someone that
the way to do something is X, no judge will be happy if you sue them
for taking your advice. '
So my editors advice was, if you want to keep it a secret, don't publish.
My take, if the code isn't published, it's advertising, not research.
On 3/13/07, Donald Bruce Stewart
ithika:
Quoth Conrad Parker, nevermore,
Besides, <tshirt>If it's not open source, it's not computer science</tshirt>. Science demands repeatable results, computer science demands literate programming. The solution is not to shy away from including code, or else the IP lawyers have won, science is banned and we get plunged into another Dark Age.
I'm glad some people agree. I've been reading the reddit comments for that blog post with a mixture of car-crash fascination and horror, where the prevailing opinions are a mixture of:
* computer scientists can't program, duh! * computer scientists aren't in academia for the advancement of knowledge, it's all about getting their name known * you just want to ride on the coat-tails of other people's brilliance; or, you're too lazy/stupid to do the work yourself * if you can't recreate it from the description in the paper then it shouldn't have been published
The final point is the only one with any merit at all, and only then in an ideal world. High level papers are not simple to translate into code, even if the resulting code is quite simple. (How long did it take for the monad to make it into programming?)
It's sad that there's such a prevailing culture of anti-intellectualism even in computer science/software engineering. So I'd like to take the opportunity to thank all the exciting academic work that gets published with code that I can read (even better when they are mixed in one literate document). And also all those contributors to The Monad Reader, who help to bridge that gap for the rest of us.
I too read the comments with a sense of frustration.
It is encouraging, somewhat, that in the original article, the Haskell paper-writing community was actually singled out as one that does tend to operate in an open source manner, and to actually produce code.
Free the lambdas!
-- Don _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe