Hi!
I work in a government-funded research facility. Over the past 6 years, we created in-house software for managing our research data. I was the primary responsible person for this project. Now, I'd like to see it being converted into an open-source project. GPL, GitHub, etc.
My boss does not rule it out straight away. But he likes to be convinced that it is a good move. He has only little idea about open-source software, licences and the like. By the way, we have no other "business plan" with this software.
My question is: Is there any material (slides, web pages, books, case studies, peer-reviewed articles) that help with promoting converting to an open-source model? Could you point me to it?
(I raised this question on a German FSF mailing list a couple of months ago but the responses did only contain personal opinions. While I agree with all of it, it does not help me.)
Regards, Torsten Bronger.
Hi
I'll not burden you with my personal opinions, then. :-)
Ten years ago, the South African government issued an excellent strategy document, "Free/Libre and Open Source Software and Open Standards in South Africa: A Critical Issue for Addressing the Digital Divide", available at http://www.prodefinity.de/docs/floss_v2_6_9.pdf.
I addresses the public policy issues rather well, I think! And contains some rather compelling thought experiments/case studies as well:
"
*FUNEKA’S AWAKENING*
Funeka is a schoolteacher with a mission: to give her dusty, rural school the very best. She launches a campaign to build a computer lab and approaches various businesses for help. To her delight, one company donates 20 computers that are being replaced, but the company will keep all their software licenses for their new machines. She also has to find her own educational software.
Delight turns to horror when she discovers that it will cost many thousands of Rand for software licenses, including licensing the educational software the dealer tells her she needs. To make matters worse, casual inspection reveals that the content is geared to American schools, using unfamiliar baseball metaphors and the like.
Meantime, Funeka’s students have been doing some legwork of their own. They have contacted a young IT company that has offered to network the computers and connect them to the Internet. When the company’s network guru calls by and finds computers with no software, she installs Linux and associated free software on all of them, sets up the network and Internet connection and even gives the students a preliminary driving lesson on using the software and surfing the Internet.
While Funeka agonises over raising a software budget, the students spend many days probing, exploring and discovering new things. Within a short time they have learned to do creative projects by searching the Internet and sending email around the world for facts they can’ find in the tiny school library. Using tools and examples from other Web sites, they soon start designing their own school Web site and developing content like a Web-based newspaper covering school and local community issues.
When she learns of all this, Funeka is amazed at the creativity of her students, and decides that her original idea of what computers should do is completely wrong. She had thought of the computer as just another passive medium of instruction. Funeka quickly adapts to this awakening, and promptly arranges a session on the Internet – given by her students to members of staff. They are all amazed that all this has happened without the school having to pay a cent in software licenses.
They also heartily approve when the students explain their plans to design a community resource for guided access to government Web sites. The one concern the students have is that they are often unable to read files downloaded from government sites. The problematic files are in a format that requires proprietary software to read."
Anyway, I apologize if you already knew that report. :-)
On 12/30/2014 09:30 PM, Torsten Bronger wrote:
Hi!
I work in a government-funded research facility. Over the past 6 years, we created in-house software for managing our research data. I was the primary responsible person for this project. Now, I'd like to see it being converted into an open-source project. GPL, GitHub, etc.
My boss does not rule it out straight away. But he likes to be convinced that it is a good move. He has only little idea about open-source software, licences and the like. By the way, we have no other "business plan" with this software.
My question is: Is there any material (slides, web pages, books, case studies, peer-reviewed articles) that help with promoting converting to an open-source model? Could you point me to it?
(I raised this question on a German FSF mailing list a couple of months ago but the responses did only contain personal opinions. While I agree with all of it, it does not help me.)
Regards, Torsten Bronger.
Hi Torsten et al.,
There are some papers comparing calc, gnumeric and excel. Seems to show peer review of gnumeric with support of R project makes it a better spreadsheet. Same gnu/octave vs matlab and others.
Might be new papers now.
EU look for more open way of publishing I do not think that they would like the money spent in H2020 be for a particular company.
R&D papers are now gold or green preferably so CC or similar. If you publish data analysis you should let others reproduce the results. And comment how correct it is. Plus a refernce to the code is quicker than describing it in a paper.
Please Post on Gitoriuos as it is on this side of the Atlantic and not propietary such as gitorious.
Personal case: after using 5 different propietary scanning probe microspe data analysis software and hitting brick wall with comments such as "cannot put voltage on data as it is not our core business" i now use gwyddion.net. I feel it is the defacto spm analysis software i.e. industry standard and companies will problably ship it by default with teir equipment. So the CMI are very visible now.
Hope it helps.
Andres
El 30 de diciembre de 2014 20:30:56 GMT, Torsten Bronger bronger@physik.rwth-aachen.de escribió:
Hi!
I work in a government-funded research facility. Over the past 6 years, we created in-house software for managing our research data. I was the primary responsible person for this project. Now, I'd like to see it being converted into an open-source project. GPL, GitHub, etc.
My boss does not rule it out straight away. But he likes to be convinced that it is a good move. He has only little idea about open-source software, licences and the like. By the way, we have no other "business plan" with this software.
My question is: Is there any material (slides, web pages, books, case studies, peer-reviewed articles) that help with promoting converting to an open-source model? Could you point me to it?
(I raised this question on a German FSF mailing list a couple of months ago but the responses did only contain personal opinions. While I agree with all of it, it does not help me.)
Regards, Torsten Bronger.
Sorry for the top post!
El 31 de diciembre de 2014 00:30:56 GMT, "Andrés Muñiz Piniella" a75576@alumni.tecnun.es escribió:
Hi Torsten et al.,
Sorry. This should be Bronger if you are German, right? As we have not personally met?
My question is: Is there any material (slides, web pages, books, case studies, peer-reviewed articles) that help with promoting converting to an open-source model? Could you point me to it?
There are some papers comparing calc, gnumeric and excel. Seems to show peer review of gnumeric with support of R project makes it a better spreadsheet. Same gnu/octave vs matlab and others.
Might be new papers now.
Also there was a europen free software conference with a published talk about funding for H2020. I think it was published in this mailing list.
I work in a government-funded research facility. Over the past 6 years, we created in-house software for managing our research data. I was the primary responsible person for this project. Now, I'd like to see it being converted into an open-source project. GPL, GitHub, etc.
EU look for more open way of publishing I do not think that they would like the money spent in H2020 be for a particular company.
R&D papers are now gold or green preferably so CC or similar. If you publish data analysis you should let others reproduce the results. And comment how correct it is. Plus a refernce to the code is quicker than describing it in a paper.
Please Post on Gitoriuos as it is on this side of the Atlantic and not propietary such as gitorious.
My boss does not rule it out straight away. But he likes to be convinced that it is a good move. He has only little idea about open-source software, licences and the like. By the way, we have no other "business plan" with this software.
Personal case: after using 5 different propietary scanning probe microspe data analysis software and hitting brick wall with comments such as "cannot put voltage on data as it is not our core business" i now use gwyddion.net. I feel it is the defacto spm analysis software i.e. industry standard and companies will problably ship it by default with teir equipment. So the CMI are very visible now.
Hope it helps.
Andres
El 30 de diciembre de 2014 20:30:56 GMT, Torsten Bronger bronger@physik.rwth-aachen.de escribió:
Hi!
I work in a government-funded research facility. Over the past 6 years, we created in-house software for managing our research data. I was the primary responsible person for this project. Now, I'd like to see it being converted into an open-source project. GPL, GitHub, etc.
My boss does not rule it out straight away. But he likes to be convinced that it is a good move. He has only little idea about open-source software, licences and the like. By the way, we have no other "business plan" with this software.
My question is: Is there any material (slides, web pages, books, case studies, peer-reviewed articles) that help with promoting converting to an open-source model? Could you point me to it?
(I raised this question on a German FSF mailing list a couple of months ago but the responses did only contain personal opinions. While I agree with all of it, it does not help me.)
Regards, Torsten Bronger.
On Tuesday 30. December 2014 21.30.56 Torsten Bronger wrote:
I work in a government-funded research facility. Over the past 6 years, we created in-house software for managing our research data. I was the primary responsible person for this project. Now, I'd like to see it being converted into an open-source project. GPL, GitHub, etc.
My boss does not rule it out straight away. But he likes to be convinced that it is a good move. He has only little idea about open-source software, licences and the like. By the way, we have no other "business plan" with this software.
My question is: Is there any material (slides, web pages, books, case studies, peer-reviewed articles) that help with promoting converting to an open-source model? Could you point me to it?
I know that there are potentially many ways of managing research data, and there's a lot of activity in the field, but have you considered looking at materials the Galaxy project have made available and/or asking them about their motivations for making their software available as Free Software?
http://galaxyproject.org/ https://wiki.galaxyproject.org/FrontPage
I have had only limited contact with the people concerned, mostly through helping others get some customisation done, and my impression is that much of the material about Galaxy is either tutorial-oriented or academic, with the usual focus on getting cited by academic publications:
https://wiki.galaxyproject.org/CitingGalaxy
So, in the "primary publications", you won't necessarily find much advocacy about Free Software despite the supposed emphasis on reproducible science and accessible tools. My personal experience from the biological sciences is that people will (1) use tools that happen to be available now without any thought to their continued availability, (2) conflate over-the-Web access with genuine availability of the software, and (3) dissuade people from installing systems themselves even if the software is freely available because of support issues (and underestimating the capabilities of users).
But if you ask the Galaxy people, maybe there is a document somewhere explicitly giving their rationale for the Free Software availability of the framework. Certainly, there should be people who can advocate such things given that they will have deployed the software themselves, and they might also be able to provide resources about their own deployments and customisations, along with thoughts on how this can only really be done by building on a Free Software foundation.
And reproducibility is a strong argument for Free Software availability, even if readers sometimes have to connect the two concepts themselves:
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1003...
Paul
On Tuesday 30. December 2014 21.30.56 Torsten Bronger wrote:
I work in a government-funded research facility. Over the past 6 years, we created in-house software for managing our research data. I was the primary responsible person for this project. Now, I'd like to see it being converted into an open-source project. GPL, GitHub, etc.
Congratulations, then, on your recent announcement:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2015-January/697649.html
I hope that the suggestions on this list were helpful in building a case for a Free Software release.
Paul
Hallöchen!
Paul Boddie writes:
On Tuesday 30. December 2014 21.30.56 Torsten Bronger wrote:
I work in a government-funded research facility. Over the past 6 years, we created in-house software for managing our research data. I was the primary responsible person for this project. Now, I'd like to see it being converted into an open-source project. GPL, GitHub, etc.
Congratulations, then, on your recent announcement:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2015-January/697649.html
Thank you!
I hope that the suggestions on this list were helpful in building a case for a Free Software release.
Well, my bosses still don't know anything about FLOSS, but perpetually bugging them turned out to be a successful strategy. ;-)
Tschö, Torsten.