[Vp-integration-subgroup] "Models are not consistently licensed"

[William Waites]

> Also you added some text about proprietary software at the end. Recall that any copyright statement makes software proprietary. And recall that open source code is generally based on copyright law, so perhaps some revision is needed there.

Yeah, I did. Sorry, I should have mentioned that. I have a 
particular case in mind that I encountered recently. Somebody
published some model code. It is very interesting for a number
of reasons and it meets any reasonable definition of free in
itself. But it is written for Mathematica. So this is free 
software that cannot be run and is not useful for combining
with other models unless you buy into that whole environment.

(I quite like Mathematica as far as it goes, but I wouldn’t
publish anything based on it that was intended to be generally
useful or reproducible.)

More common in computational biology and nearby fields is 
models written for Matlab. Unless they are very careful to 
keep to the subset of the language that is compatible with
GNU Octave, they have the same problem.


Cheers,
-w