[ale] Disappointed in the recent climate research hack

Greg Freemyer greg.freemyer at gmail.com
Mon Nov 23 13:25:35 EST 2009


All,

Not sure everyone knows but a major climate research center was hacked
recently and in addition to 1000 emails or so, some of their source
code was published!

In this age of OPEN research and government funding, why wasn't that
code OPEN in the first place?

I don't care which side of the Global Warming debate you sit on, we
should all feel it is to important to have the modeling code be
published under a GPL (or similar license) and available for peer
review.

If one of you knows of the "best' license for this kind of use I want
to contact my senator and congressman and tell them we need
legislation that all federally funded climate change research should
have both the data and the software models released to the public!

I encourage all OSS advocates to do the same.  This seems like an
issue the requires a OSS philosophy more that any other I can think
of.

After all, if the government thinks climate change is worth
implementing cap and trade over, then it is important enough to let
the public know how the models work.

Thanks
Greg


More information about the Ale mailing list