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Free to know: Open access and open source

Photo source: Álvaro Serrano (@alvaroserrano) | Unsplash

Q&A with Vedran Miletić

In June 2014, Elon Musk opened up all Tesla patents. In a blog post announcing this, he wrote that patents "serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors." In other words, he joined those who believe that free knowledge is the prerequisite for a great society -- that it is the vibrancy of the educated masses that can make us capable of handling the strange problems our world is made of.

The movements that promote and cultivate this vibrancy are probably most frequently associated with terms "Open access" and "open source". In order to learn more about them, we Q&A-ed Vedran Miletić, the Rocker of Science -- researcher, developer and teacher, currently working in computational chemistry, and a free and open source software contributor and activist. You can read more of his thoughts on free software and related themes on his great blog, Nudged Elastic Band. We hope you will join him, us, and Elon Musk in promoting free knowledge, cooperation and education.

I am still not buying the new-open-source-friendly-Microsoft narrative

Photo source: Patrick Bellot (@pbellot) | Unsplash

This week Microsoft released Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK) on GitHub, after open sourcing Edge's JavaScript engine last month and a whole bunch of projects before that.

Even though the open sourcing of a bunch of their software is a very nice move from Microsoft, I am still not convinced that they have changed to the core. I am sure there are parts of the company who believe that free and open source is the way to go, but it still looks like a change just on the periphery.

All the projects they have open-sourced so far are not the core of their business. Their latest version of Windows is no more friendly to alternative operating systems than any version of Windows before it, and one could argue it is even less friendly due to more Secure Boot restrictions. Using Office still basically requires you to use Microsoft's formats and, in turn, accept their vendor lock-in.

Put simply, I think all the projects Microsoft has opened up so far are a nice start, but they still have a long way to go to gain respect from the open-source community. What follows are three steps Microsoft could take in that direction.

AMD and the open-source community are writing history

Photo source: Andrew Dawes (@andrewdawes) | Unsplash

Over the last few years, AMD has slowly been walking the path towards having fully open source drivers on Linux. AMD did not walk alone, they got help from Red Hat, SUSE, and probably others. Phoronix also mentions PathScale, but I have been told on Freenode channel #radeon this is not the case and found no trace of their involvement.

AMD finally publically unveiled the GPUOpen initiative on the 15th of December 2015. The story was covered on AnandTech, Maximum PC, Ars Technica, Softpedia, and others. For the open-source community that follows the development of Linux graphics and computing stack, this announcement comes as hardly surprising: Alex Deucher and Jammy Zhou presented plans regarding amdgpu on XDC2015 in September 2015. Regardless, public announcement in mainstream media proves that AMD is serious about GPUOpen.

I believe GPUOpen is the best chance we will get in this decade to open up the driver and software stacks in the graphics and computing industry. I will outline the reasons for my optimism below. As for the history behind open-source drivers for ATi/AMD GPUs, I suggest the well-written reminiscence on Phoronix.

On having leverage and using it for pushing open-source software adoption

Photo source: Alina Grubnyak (@alinnnaaaa) | Unsplash

Back in late August and early September, I attended 4th CP2K Tutorial organized by CECAM in Zürich. I had the pleasure of meeting Joost VandeVondele's Nanoscale Simulations group at ETHZ and working with them on improving CP2K. It was both fun and productive; we overhauled the wiki homepage and introduced acronyms page, among other things. During a coffee break, there was a discussion on the JPCL viewpoint that speaks against open-source quantum chemistry software, which I countered in the previous blog post.

But there is a story from the workshop which somehow remained untold, and I wanted to tell it at some point. One of the attendants, Valérie Vaissier, told me how she used proprietary quantum chemistry software during her Ph.D.; if I recall correctly, it was Gaussian. Eventually, she decided to learn CP2K and made the switch. She liked CP2K better than the proprietary software package because it is available free of charge, the reported bugs get fixed quicker, and the group of developers behind it is very enthusiastic about their work and open to outsiders who want to join the development.

What is the price of open-source fear, uncertainty, and doubt?

Photo source: j (@janicetea) | Unsplash

The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters (JPCL), published by American Chemical Society, recently put out two Viewpoints discussing open-source software:

1. Open Source and Open Data Should Be Standard Practices by J. Daniel Gezelter, and
2. What Is the Price of Open-Source Software? by Anna I. Krylov, John M. Herbert, Filipp Furche, Martin Head-Gordon, Peter J. Knowles, Roland Lindh, Frederick R. Manby, Peter Pulay, Chris-Kriton Skylaris, and Hans-Joachim Werner.

Viewpoints are not detailed reviews of the topic, but instead, present the author's view on the state-of-the-art of a particular field.

The first of two articles stands for open source and open data. The article describes Quantum Chemical Program Exchange (QCPE), which was used in the 1980s and 1990s for the exchange of quantum chemistry codes between researchers and is roughly equivalent to the modern-day GitHub. The second of two articles questions the open-source software development practice, advocating the usage and development of proprietary software. I will dissect and counter some of the key points from the second article below.

Joys and pains of interdisciplinary research

Photo source: Trnava University (@trnavskauni) | Unsplash

In 2012 University of Rijeka became NVIDIA GPU Education Center (back then it was called CUDA Teaching Center). For non-techies: NVIDIA is a company producing graphical processors (GPUs), the computer chips that draw 3D graphics in games and the effects in modern movies. In the last couple of years, NVIDIA and other manufacturers allowed the usage of GPUs for general computations, so one can use them to do really fast multiplication of large matrices, finding paths in graphs, and other mathematical operations.

Open-source magic all around the world

Photo source: Almos Bechtold (@almosbech) | Unsplash

Last week brought us two interesting events related to open-source movement: 2015 Red Hat Summit (June 23-26, Boston, MA) and Skeptics in the pub (June 26, Rijeka, Croatia).

The follow-up

Photo source: Andre Benz (@trapnation) | Unsplash

When Linkin Park released their second album Meteora, they had a quote on their site that went along the lines of

Musicians have their entire lives to come up with a debut album, and only a very short time afterward to release a follow-up.

Browser wars

Photo source: Ray Hennessy (@rayhennessy) | Unsplash

Last week in Rijeka we held Science festival 2015. This is the (hopefully not unlucky) 13th instance of the festival that started in 2003. Popular science events were organized in 18 cities in Croatia.

I was invited to give a popular lecture at the University departments open day, which is a part of the festival. This is the second time in a row that I got invited to give popular lecture at the open day. In 2014 I talked about The Perfect Storm in information technology caused by the fall of economy during 2008-2012 Great Recession and the simultaneous rise of low-cost, high-value open-source solutions. Open source completely changed the landscape of information technology in just a few years.