antonovka

If Stephen McIntyre is all about openness and taking advantage of the abhorrent disclosure of internal communications, why doesn't he follow suite by posting all of his personal e-mail correspondence, unedited for external review?

I'm sure there are more than a few gems.

Isn't the scientific ideal all about openness and reproducible analyses?

Yes, but when someone applies such a strong political ideology to twisting those analyses, how do you propose scientists respond?

Climate change has been so politicized by unqualified ideologues that I can hardly blame scientists for wishing to defend themselves from the worst of them.

If anything, these e-mails demonstrate that the data IS shared independently evaluated, but that the community has established political defenses to deal with political -- not scientific -- opponents.

To do otherwise would be naive. Complex topics fall easily to those who would politicize them.

These emails make it look like the new ideal is supporting the "correct" political agenda.

No, they demonstrate a clear interest in defending against the attacks of a very specific set of ideologues.

As someone who has had to defend engineering projects and people from angry corporate politics, I don't envy these climate change scientists in the least, and I certainly don't begrudge them their defensive positions.

Yeah, because this is definitely the argument this article is about...

You're saying that your solution isn't to develop for Free Software platforms?

I apologize for making assumptions based on your comment history. If that's not your solution, then how do you propose we developers resolve our issues instead of voicing our complaints?

I read McIntyre's site regularly, and find very little evidence of this. His 'political ends'?

McIntyre spent 30 years in the oil/gas exploration business ("mineral exploration"). You don't think there are some vested politics here?

You might argue successfully that his pedantic insistence on sources, data, and algorithms gets in the way of 'progress', but to say that this is because of his political views is a gross error.

There's plenty of room to distort the facts while reporting them. Fox News consistently claims to present "the facts" in a "fair and balanced" manner.

... I guess one reason for it is that BSD license put off more developers compared to GPLv2.

No, it was just timing. The AT&T lawsuit cast a palor on the BSDs just when Linux started hitting its stride. By the time the lawsuit was settled, Linux had dominant mindshare.

Same reason why MySQL is popular -- PHP gave it the mindshare. Same reason why PHP is popular -- it was one of the few options available at the time, and by the time better things came along, it was already firmly rooted.

Well, what this showed us is that some respected climate researchers are just making shit up.

What proof?

He has a clear political agenda. He's not an independent scientist (he's not even a scientist).

What possible good can come of interacting with someone who -- in addition to being grossly underqualified -- has a consistent history of applying a political agenda without fail to their "science"?

This is the equivalent of Fox News factual reporting. Sometimes they get the facts right, but that doesn't mean they aren't twisting them.

If I had a persistent gadfly like Stephen McIntyre who would use every opportunity to twist my data and words to his own political ends -- and the media accordingly -- I might also behave in such an untoward manner regarding the release of data and internal communications.

I find the theft of internal communications abhorrent, the politicalization of the issue uninteresting, and I seriously doubt there's any real science to be gleaned from this entire sophomoric debacle.

Then don't read them. I'm tired of the vagaries of Linux on my desktop, but I solve that by not using it.

If you stopped developing for the iPhone and started developing web applications or desktop applications or, indeed, almost any other type of software, you wouldn't have to ask anyone's permission to sell your software or improve your software.

Not everyone wants to write desktop or web applications.

My choice to work with the iPhone is a technical decision -- the hacker in me will stick with the platform because I love writing code for it -- at least until it's clear that it makes no sense for my business.

I'll continue to voice my concerns because I see the technical value of what Apple has created and the potential for Apple to improve.

If I were writing desktop applications, I would be writing them for the Mac, as well. I don't want to see Apple turn to the darkside, on the iPhone or otherwise.

[Edit] The downvoting to -0 on this comment and others in this thread is, in my opinion, entirely inappropriate. My argument is cogent, and if it doesn't match your worldview I might suggest that you attempt a cogent reply in return, rather than downvoting opinions you disagree into the negatives.

Politicized science is not good science.

Please support the claim that they "hid" their data. Note that citing an unqualified politically biased source is not adequate support for such a serious scientific claim.

As a scientist why would I invest my time in providing additional support to someone that will simply twist whatever assistance is provided to support his own agenda?

As a programmer I wouldn't certainly not waste my time assisting someone who merely intended to smear my project in his blog to meet his own political ends.

The only people afraid of sunlight are those people with something to be ashamed of.

There are plenty of reasons to be afraid of exposing internal communications due to the vagaries of political processes and vendettas.

To claim otherwise is naive, disingenuous, or both.

I wasn't aware that you needed to be "qualified" to be allowed to reproduce mathematical models.

I'm sure that if he just wasn't being kept down by those evil climate scientists, he'd prove them all wrong.

Of course, the email wasn't private, was it? It's a government funded (your money) institution.

This justifies breaking federal law and then excising context as to leverage out-of-context statements to dishonestly support your position?

It's no wonder that climate scientists are mildly paranoid about the behavior of "deniers".

But you're wrong about who is ranting. It's you who are ranting.

You've convinced me sir. I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

An ignorant, unqualified gadfly complaining about a lack of assistance and collaboration from working scientists is not a compelling argument.

You're ranting like a loon about brainwashing, cheering on the hacking of private e-mail, and you're getting upvoted for it?

If my e-mail was hacked and out-of-context quotes were levied to take ignorant pot shots at my work, I would be beyond livid. This behavior is absolutely inappropriate and I hope the perpetrator is caught and jailed.

Are these people telling me i can't smoke in front of my computer?

No, they're telling you that they won't fix damage caused by smoking, and they won't force their computer technicians to clean up a disgusting and harmful mess of sticky tar and dust.

Other than Lessig, that trio does not even begin to represent me or innumerable other open source developers. RMS and Linus represent GPL and Linux developers, who are are only one component of the broader community.

The GPL/Linux ideals are clearly and fundamentally opposed to my own, and I would be insulted if RMS and Linus accepted the award on behalf of the open source community at large.

Open source has long existed and thrived without RMS and the GPL.

Your argument makes the unfounded assumption that those vendors would have done the work you "lost" if the code had been GPL licensed.

As a counterpoint, FreeBSD has progressed at a steady clip -- I fail to see how it is significantly behind Linux, and is significantly ahead in many areas.

Read the parent comment. I was replying to the specific statement that one cannot download apps onto the device other than through the App Store, not addressing whether it is useful or not as a channel to distribute apps.

I can get out and push my car, but that doesn't make it a hybrid.

As to your other points, sign up for the Enterprise program.

The enterprise program does not allow for external distribution and is not useful (or even permitted) outside of large enterprise organizations.

The big appeal of C for me is that it's portable (as long as you know to avoid the non-portable parts, anyway). Sorry, but I won't be using any language extension that will only compile on mac.

I agree, but the compiler changes are open source, and I'm happy to use them on a Mac (where I'm already using ObjC anyway).

And anyway, function pointers aren't that hard to groc.

Function pointers aren't closures. "Groking" isn't the issue -- accomplishing more with less code and fewer bugs is.

Ad-hoc distribution requires that you:

1) Share your unique device identifier with the developer.

2) The developer registers that device ID with Apple. Only 100 devices per developer may be registered in one year.

3) Apple signs a signing certificate which includes that device ID.

4) The developer signs the application binary with their private key and includes the Apple-signed certificate with the binary.

This is absolutely not useful for anything other than beta testing.

People are used to more, and we need to do it with less time. They don't want to wait for loading screens, they want to load their smoothly scrolling images over the WiFi on-demand from Flickr while performing high quality interpolation to produce the thumbnails.

They want to rotate the device to CoverFlow, and we'll have to load all those images as GL textures and pay the CPU hit for rendering the text labels as they rapidly scroll through their caturday pictures, all the while downloading and caching images in the background to provide a seamless and smooth user experience.

I can't add loading screens (so I have time to preload/pre-render), or restrict my data accesses to loading to optimized textures I have on disk, or spend months (years?) working on optimizing out every CPU cycle. That's not what people want.

So yes, for the things people expect from our applications, we're up against serious resource limits.

As someone with a mildly neglected (but understanding) wife and and an on-hold personal life, I couldn't disagree with your comment more -- but it's also not what the article said. The article said:

[Your] business is rarely so fragile that it can not suffer some minor neglect _now and again_.

Emphasis on now and again. You will have to put your personal and family life on hold, but you'll also need to figure out how to maintain your relationships while you do it.

Starting a company requires a tremendous amount of work, and I've regularly had to choose between what I want (a relaxing dinner out with my wife) and what I need to get done to maximize our chances of scaling to the next stable plateau (a contract, the next product feature, etc).

If you're not ready to put everything on hold and work your ass off, then starting a company is probably not the right choice for you.

Which means that the original corporation won't participate (unless forced to by accidentally including GPL'd code) because there are a lot of very good reasons for a corporation to not share their source code (ie, competitive advantage), and we've come full circle.

I don't see how one could possibly sanely think that I would find a copy of, say, Civilization 4 without models, textures, and sound to be useful.

Are you serious? It's a drop-in game engine. You could create a variation on Civilization 4 for the cost of your artists.

FWIW, I contribute to an app that has been on the App Store for ~10 months now, been in the top 100 for its category since release and is open source (under a BSD license). We've had several people tell us that someone could do this very thing - compile the app and post it online for free - but it hasn't been done yet.

That would be because:

- The copied app (unlike on the free internet) couldn't be called "Colloquy" (or reference Colloquy in its tags) because Apple would forbid its distribution, and so discoverability is significantly reduced.

- It costs $99 to acquire an appstore developer certificate to work with Apple's DRM, reducing the chances of opportunistic behavior on behalf of users. I can't just check out your project and put it online.

Of course, the app has been cracked and placed on other sites (and its technically legal since binary modifications/redistributions are allowed). But thats a different issue.

Is it really a different issue? It seems like the only thing protecting you from unrestricted copying is Apple's DRM and control over the AppStore.

There's nothing about the GPL that says you can't sell your product.

I wish this tired GPL counterpoint would be put to rest. If you provide the source code for your software, someone else will compile it and distribute a binary legally and for free.

That -- without any shadow of a doubt -- hurts sales (even if you "highly doubt it").

RedHat sells services, not software. That's why they can afford for CentOS to keep doing what they do.

For this vision to become reality, the process would need to get much, much easier.

I think that's the whole point.

The services provided by Flickr and Facebook used to be quite a bit more difficult to achieve, too.

There is a very simple solution to getting your stuff to run on many linux distros without too much trouble: static linking.

That's not simple at all. If I want to integrate properly with your desktop, do I write my code against gnome or KDE?

If I statically link against an older (or newer) version of gnome or KDE, will it even interoperate correctly with whatever the user has running on their desktop?

If there's a security vulnerability in what should be a base system library, does every single vendor have to track those issues and release updates to their applications?

No. The right way to support binary compatibility is to define a compatible, stable API and ABI and then support that ABI/API across OS releases and updates.