From owner-chemistry&$at$&ccl.net Fri Oct 28 03:18:01 2005
From: "M. L. Dodson bdodson*|*scms.utmb.EDU" <owner-chemistry|a|server.ccl.net>
To: CCL
Subject: CCL:G: Filters
Message-Id: <-29809-051027232122-25404-BN0hQIvIHpz6NO4f/akd6A|a|server.ccl.net>
X-Original-From: "M. L. Dodson" <bdodson]^[scms.utmb.EDU>
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2005 22:21:17 -0500
Mime-Version: 1.0


Sent to CCL by: "M. L. Dodson" [bdodson . scms.utmb.EDU]
On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 09:13:21AM -0500, Aaron Deskins ndeskins(~)purdue.edu wrote:
> 
> Sent to CCL by: Aaron Deskins [ndeskins[]purdue.edu]
> Jim Kress ccl_nospam.:.kressworks.com wrote:
> 
> >Sent to CCL by: "Jim Kress" [ccl_nospam%a%kressworks.com]
> >They're not working for free.  Their using the government as an agent to
> >take money from their neighbors to pay for their work (i.e. government
> >grants).  Then they sell the results of that work to the people who paid 
> >for
> >it originally (i.e. taxpayers).
> >
> >That's called double dipping and it's immoral.
> >
> >Remember, all government money comes from us taxpayers.  No matter what any
> >government employee tells you, there is no money tree in Washington.
> >
> >Jim
> >
> > 
> >
> This topic seems mostly to come down to a discussion of the merits of 
> free-market capitalism versus socialism. Who does work better: 
> profit-minded citizens or government paid workers? Of course it depends, 
> but I think if Gaussian was never commercialized, then we all very well 
> could have been stuck using Gaussian 86.
> 

Why don't we all cool down a little bit and avoid words like
immoral and socialism.  The discussion might gain some civility in
the process.

I'll only say that if you think open source is socialism, you have
missed the point about open source.  Think of peer review as a
better analogy or descriptor.  The advantage of open source
consumer s/w is the increase in the number of "eyeballs" looking
at the code, and the substantially better debugging (and maybe,
just maybe, an increase in the efficiency of the algorithms) that
follows from that "peer review".  As I see it this advantage would
not carry over into computational chemistry s/w IN A SIMPLE WAY
for two conflicting reasons: (1) most computational chemistry s/w
is in fact open source (whether or not you pay for it), so
theoretically that benefit should hold, HOWEVER (2) due to the
small "market" the people looking at the code are not, by and
large, computer scientists, so debugging is not as good as, e.g.,
apache, BSD unix, Linux, etc.  And, in any case, if the
"purveyers" of CC s/w are not willing to take patches from the
community, that benefit will not be realized.  And that is the
only way you get YOUR ideas implemented in most projects:
describing a better algorithm on an email list is not enough; you
must submit patches.

Most open source projects have multiple email lists, some devoted
to support (in the sense of the "Gaussian questions"), others to
discussion of the algorithms ("theory"), and still others to the
development process itself.  So the "Gaussian question" problem
does not occur.  Only people wanting to ask or answer "Gaussian
questions" subscribe to that particular list.

I'm just trying to inject a little reality about open source into
this discussion which has been filled with a lot of misinformation
and almost complete lack of appreciation of the real user benefits
of the open source s/w movement (far beyond the cost of the s/w).
-- 
M. L. Dodson
Personal:       mldodson-at-houston-dot-rr-dot-com
Work:           bdodson-at-scms-dot-utmb-dot-edu
Work: four_zero_nine-772-2178             FAX: four_zero_nine-772-1790