[Insight-users] Reproducible results and semi-open science

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi Andriy,

Thanks for the clarification.


The CGAL's license:
http://www.cgal.org/license.html

propagates a widespread misunderstanding of what "Open Source" means.


They still think that the "Free" in "Free Software" refers
to price, and not to Freedom.


Whoever makes the split of software options as:

         "open source"   versus  "commercial"

have not understood at all what the free software movement is about.


     Open Source software *CAN* be commercial.
     Open Source software is about *Freedom*, not price.



The CGAL developers may have skipped the reading of Richard Stallman's
GNU manifesto. A reading that should be mandatory for anybody who is
going to dare to talk about free software and open source software.



-----


Going back to the practical aspects:

There are Debian and Ubuntu development packages for CGAL.
This would make the installation of CGAL a lot easier that
if we have to building in the Insight Journal machine.


Could you please list the exact list of packages that you
will require ?


      a) libcgal-dev (3.2.1-1)  ?
      b) libboost-dev (1.33.1)  ?


Please let us know,


    Thanks


       Luis



BTW: Please keep this discussion in the developers and or users list,
      this is a topic of potential interest to the larger community.


----------------------
Andriy Fedorov wrote:
> Hi Luis,
> 
> Thank you for your reply. As always, it is very insightful! :)
> 
> I do not have the answers on the open questions you have. Indeed, one
> has to completely rethink what is legal and what is not. For now, I am
> going to leave these questions for my superiors to answer.
> 
> Let me answer the practical questions you had.
> 
> 
>> The concerns are rather of practical nature:
>>
>>           How big is software "A"   ?
>>
>>           How easy is to automatically
>>           build/install software "A" ?
>>
> 
> 
> Alexandre was right in his guess that one of the software packages I
> mentioned was CGAL (http://cgal.org). I didn't want to go into
> specifics right away.
> 
> CGAL is big, and it does not use CMake. It also depends on Boost
> (http://boost.org, which is distributed under an opensource license).
> 
> 
> 
>>           How many other potential submissions
>>           could benefit from software "A"
>>           being available in the IJ server ?
>>
> 
> 
> I cannot answer this one, but I think both CGAL and Boost are quite
> generic to benefit other users.
> 
> 
>> Please let us know if this answer your original question,
>> and whether you have any additional questions regarding
>> the Insight Journal.
>>
> 
> 
> How difficult it is to have CGAL installed on the IJ server? Can this be done?
> 
> I assume the decision whether to install package like CGAL on IJ
> server or not can depend on the value of the potential submission
> which will benefit from it. If this is the case, please let me know --
> I am ready to discuss this offline.
> 
> Thank you
> 
> Andriy Fedorov
>