[WSSSPE] WSSSPE4

Wed Feb 17 13:04:23 PST 2016

Hi Neil,

I like the document you shared about licensing issues.  I'll read it and contribute if I feel I can have anything further to say.

At this moment in time I'd like to point out that fear is not the only reason - protecting leadership and competitive advantage also come in play and with restricted source licensing (where some control over the code remains with authors or institutions) one could warrant these.  Obviously, the creators of the code or the concepts (as not every software architect writes source) may not be retained by the organisation that funded the project, one of the outcome of which has the software component in question.  However, the institution that has made it happen still preserves a number of rights and advantages.  These could be released at a later stage upon agreements.  I have seen that twice before - once moving to BSD2 and once moving all the know-how to a particular university group.

What captured my attention in the document was the recommendation of the open source licences - https://opensource.org/licenses - but as one can also see in https://opensource.org/licenses/category under <<Others/Miscellaneous>> there is the Artistic 2.0 - https://opensource.org/licenses/Artistic-2.0 which has been favoured by STFC and we use in quite a few software projects within my group.

Regards,

Ilian

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr. Ilian T. Todorov, A45                  Tel: (+44) 0 1925 60 3681

Leader, Computational Chemistry Group      Mob: (+44) 0 7799 75 2297

                                           Fax: (+44) 0 1925 60 3634

SC Department, STFC - Daresbury Laboratory

Sci-Tech Daresbury, Keckwick Lane, Daresbury

Warrington WA4 4AD, Cheshire, United Kingdom

--------------------------------------------------------------------

DL_POLY Molecular Simulation Package: http://www.ccp5.ac.uk/DL_POLY/

--------------------------------------------------------------------

________________________________
From: WSSSPE [wssspe-bounces at lists.researchcomputing.org.uk] on behalf of Neil Chue Hong (SSI) [N.ChueHong at software.ac.uk]
Sent: 17 February 2016 12:25
To: Manish Parashar
Cc: Working on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experience
Subject: Re: [WSSSPE] WSSSPE4

I agree that there's still a purpose in holding WSSSPE meetings.

I like Sou-Cheng's ideas (my personal preference would be for demos to be introduced with short 5 minute plenary slots, followed by a longer parallel session where people can ask questions/interact if they want to).

I really like Michael's idea. I agree that a big issue with sustainability is the funding, and perhaps by working together more, we can become better at getting funding for the things we think collectively need it the most rather than a more scatter-gun approach.

For those of us not in the US, can I make a plea for this to be located somewhere which is no more than one hop from a major US entry-hub, so that it's a two hop journey for international attendees?

I also think that there should be a little more focus on the "doing" part of the meeting, where there's a selection of what the community thinks is most important ahead of time - the "what's going to kill us first" style of prioritisation - to enable participants to hit the ground running at the meeting. This might reduce the number of participants, as not everyone might be interested in the topic, but would ensure that we didn't spread ourselves too thin. Perhaps we could use the prioritisations from WSSSPE3 as a starting point?

As for things we could do differently / in addition, two things come to mind (triggered by Lorraine's comments):
- More case studies, including negative or even neutral ones. We should be able to provide pointers to practices in use and how they turned out
- Create a list of evidence that will convince sceptics, and work together to tick off that list one by one

For example:

- Employing a trained software engineer on a scientific software project leads to long-term savings and increased related scientific output over hiring more untrained postdocs / students

- If you have $10m this year to fund software in a specific area, when is it better to:
a) Provide $10m to one project and ask all the others to merge with it or die
b) Provide $2m to five projects to increase competition and innovation
c) Provide short-fat funding to enable significant new functionality or refactoring
d) Provide long-thin funding to enable retention of skills and ensure maintenance
e) etc. etc.

- Addressing fears over open-sourcing scientific software (we created a list of fears [1]  as part of work on software development practice in the ELIXIR European Life Sciences consortium, along with initial attempts to address them, but it would be good to point to specific examples)

Best regards,
Neil

[1] This is a draft for information only, and shouldn't be seen as finished: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C8sWr-r9RJBO-RZaDtgjmlHLHCyTHxsBrD6I12vknQs/edit#heading=h.bg6it3rwav23

On 17 February 2016 at 10:27, Manish Parashar <parashar at rutgers.edu<mailto:parashar at rutgers.edu>> wrote:
Hi Dan,

Agree with most of the comments — I think a focused event on Fall is a good idea and co-locating it with another event makes sense. Something on the east coast (DC) would be great.

Two aspects I would like to see in the workshop is the role of sustainable software in reproducibility, and approaches/best practices in credit/attribution for software.

Regards

Manish

--
==========================================================================
Manish Parashar Office: CoRE Bldg, Rm 628
RDI2/OARC/Dept. of Computer Science Phone: (848) 445-5388<tel:%28848%29%20445-5388>
Rutgers University Fax:     (732) 445-0537<tel:%28732%29%20445-0537>
110 Frelinghuysen Road Email: parashar at rutgers dot edu
Piscataway, NJ 08854-8019 WWW: http://parashar.rutgers.edu
===========================================================================

On Feb 16, 2016, at 11:19 AM, Daniel S. Katz <d.katz at ieee.org<mailto:d.katz at ieee.org>> wrote:

Hi,

Please let me know your thoughts about a WSSSPE4 meeting, probably in the fall/autumn.

What would you want such a meeting to accomplish, thinking of what we’ve done previously and what new topics might have come up.

Where should such a meeting take place?

Should we do this along with any other event?

Thanks,
Dan

--
Daniel S. Katz
University of Chicago
(773) 834-7186<tel:%28773%29%C2%A0834-7186> (voice)
(773) 834-6818<tel:%28773%29%20834-6818> (fax)
d.katz at ieee.org<mailto:d.katz at ieee.org> or dsk at uchicago.edu<mailto:dsk at ci.uchicago.edu>
http://danielskatz.org<http://danielskatz.org/>

_______________________________________________
WSSSPE mailing list
WSSSPE at lists.researchcomputing.org.uk<mailto:WSSSPE at lists.researchcomputing.org.uk>
http://lists.researchcomputing.org.uk/listinfo.cgi/wssspe-researchcomputing.org.uk

_______________________________________________
WSSSPE mailing list
WSSSPE at lists.researchcomputing.org.uk<mailto:WSSSPE at lists.researchcomputing.org.uk>
http://lists.researchcomputing.org.uk/listinfo.cgi/wssspe-researchcomputing.org.uk

--
Neil Chue Hong
Director, Software Sustainability Institute
EPCC, University of Edinburgh, JCMB, Edinburgh, EH9 3FD, UK
Tel: +44 (0)131 650 5957
http://www.software.ac.uk/

LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/neilchuehong
Twitter: http://twitter.com/npch
ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8876-7606