Advocacy material for "going open source"?
Paul Boddie
paul at boddie.org.uk
Mon Jan 5 18:26:05 UTC 2015
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.1003285
Paul
More information about the Discussion
mailing list