- Posts tagged opensource
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HPCwire: Computational Chemistry Package NWChem Goes Open Source
NWChem, the premier computational chemistry package developed at the Department of Energy's EMSL, is going open source -- allowing computer scientists worldwide to contribute to its future development and opening its use to more researchers and students.
Good news.
Pumpichank: What We Do
To me, the free and open source ethos goes much deeper than just the software we write. It's about collaboration, community, sharing, learning, teaching, and having a truly positive impact on the world. It's about empowering individuals to realize their full potential, to give them the opportunity to build a merit based reputation, to carve out their own areas of interest and expertise, and relate that to the larger society, to know that they make a difference, and that their opinions and contributions matter.
By Barry Warsaw, of Python community fame. Read the whole thing, it's great.
Dear researcher, which side of history will you be on? | Mendeley Blog
We came to the conclusion that technology is finally at a point that if we don’t use it now, then we are holding back the progress of science. And what exactly are we to use technology on? Open science/data/access.
Revisiting Ethos | jonobacon@home
When I first heard about Free Software in 1998 I was mesmerized by it’s potential. Sure, back then the software was complex and some would argue ugly, but underneath the rough edges was a thing of beauty — the opportunity for people to come together to make new things, and anyone with the inclination and energy could take part.
Jono's description really rings home for me. When I first really started hearing about FLOSS, I was 18. I'd been using Linux and Unix for seven years (but only on dial-in BBSes and the like) but I'd never considered using it on my desktop. And then I picked up a copy of SUSE 6.1, installed it, and started looking beneath the surface. I still believe in the principles, but it's hard not to get frustrated with where computing is going. I've tried to use those principles in my research, pushing my code and my data into the open while encouraging my colleagues and collaborators to do so as well. We've been successful so far, but the Grand Experiment (as my current mentor likes to call it) is just beginning. (More on that as it occurs.) In many ways the FLOSS community and the Scientific communities are very similar, but the cross-talk is sadly limited.
To answer the prompt from Jono that I didn't quote above, I'm passionate about Free Software and Open Source software because I want my kids to have the same opportunities and the same encouragements that I did. And because I think it's really guided me, my personal and my professional interactions in many ways, and I want to make sure that spirit of collaboration, of openness, of tinkering and problem solving never dies out.
Michael Nielsen » Cameron Neylon on practical steps toward open science
The most critical issue however is rapid deployment of expertise to specific problems. To apply a distributed rapid innovation model we need the means to rapidly identify the very limited number of people with appropriate expertise to solve the problem at hand. We also need to rethink our research processes to make them more modular so that they can be divided up and distributed. Finally we need capacity in the system that makes it possible for expertise to actually be rapidly deployed. Its not clear to me how we achieve these goals although things like Innocentive, CoLab, Friendfeed, and others are pointing out potential directions. We are a long way from delivering on the promise and its not clear what a practical route there is.
Practical steps: more effective communication mechanisms will be driven by rewarding people for re-use of their work. Capacity can be added by baseline funding. Modularity is an attitude and a design approach which we will probably need to build into training and will be hard to do in a community where everything is bespoke and great pride is taken in eating our own dogfood but never trusting anyone else’s…
I find this particularly compelling, especially in light of some of the growing pains yt has been having. We're trying to build something that's useful, without losing sight of our own personal goals, and it's difficult at times. But we've been having some amazing successes, and I think it's worth it.
CIA Software Developer Goes Open Source, Instead | Danger Room | Wired.com
“The Department of Defense spends tens of billions of dollars annually creating software that is rarely reused and difficult to adapt to new threats. Instead, much of this software is allowed to become the property of defense companies, resulting in DoD repeatedly funding the same solutions or, worse, repaying to use previously created software,” writes John M. Scott, a freelance defense consultant and a chief evangelist in the military open source movement. “Imagine if only the manufacturer of a rifle were allowed to clean, fix, modify or upgrade that rifle. This is where the military finds itself: one contractor with a monopoly on the knowledge of a military software system.”
Four Big Ideas from the Open Science Summit 2010
Our new vision for CoLab is to enable scientific debate around any piece of scientific content. We want to make it stupid easy to center a discussion around protocols, data, plots, published papers, papers in progress, simulations, code, or any other component of scientific research. As an experimentalist, I should be able to import a lab protocol, raw data, or manipulable plots based on a live feed from that raw data and discuss it online with collaborators across the globe. As a computational scientist, I should be able to import code or live simulations and troubleshoot online with anyone in the world who might be able to help. As a member of a journal club, I should be able to import a published paper and collaboratively highlight and annotate in-line with colleagues, from those in the lab next door to those in another country. As a researcher ready to publish, I should be able to host a working version of my paper online, collaboratively edit with any of my colleagues, and submit a link directly to a journal, without being forced to download the paper and make finishing touches offline. In short, as a scientist, I should be able to easily and openly discuss any piece of my science with my entire scientific community.
Interesting vision. CoLab is something to keep a close eye on.
Shedding Bikes: Programming Culture And Philosophy
But, seriously, if your first question about a piece of GPL software is, "How can I go about gettin' around the GPL?" Then you just don't get open source at all.
Zed Shaw relicenses his project Lamson under the BSD license. I favor the GPL in my projects, but my projects tend to be much more specific and targeted at a very narrow audience, so any experience I have from that may be inapplicable to the style of projects elsewhere in the "Python Community."
GSoC folks, read this: (Re: Lightweight copies/renames)
The real challenge of GSoC is not coding, it's learning to work with a community. And the first lesson is: communicate in public
An amazing discussion not only of Google Summer of Code, but of Open Source development in general by Matt Mackall, kernel hacker and project lead of mercurial. Developers on the yt project are in general pretty good about this kind of thing, but there are some aspects of the development process (and I am a culprit here too) that could use improvement along these lines.
Making Programming Easier For Kids With PyJunior | jonobacon@home
PyJunior is a little program that has a very focused goal: to provide a simple environment for kids to play with Python. Python is a beautiful language and one ideally suited for kids and others to get started with programming. My goal was to make something incredibly simple and very focused on simple programming tasks. My intention here is not to build a full programming environment with access to Glade, PyGTK documentation and testing tools: that is simply too much. It was instead to allow a kid to write instructions in a program, press a button and watch it work.
Jono Bacon continues to amaze. This program is the anti-iPad.
