Open Source Software In Education Pushed By Government

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ever, scientists rarely make their software available to other scientists for scrutiny--and even if they did, they often used closed-source programs in which the underlying source code is protected by copyright and trade secrecy claims. But this practice strikes at the heart of science, namely, the notion of verifiability. To be accepted as valid, all calculations and assumptions that go into a given scientific assumption must be open to public scrutiny. Yet closed-source software makes such scrutiny impossible.

These are the simple facts, from which Dan Gazelter, a professor of biochemistry at Notre Dame University, draws the following, compelling conclusion: scientists are positively obligated to use open-source software, and what is more, the future of an increasingly computerized scientific enterprise may well depend on their decision to do so (Gezelter 1999; cf. Wilson 1999). Increasingly, scientists and university librarians are developing clearinghouses and large-scale development projects to create more open-source alternatives for use in higher education (see the Open Science Project and oss4lib).

But the use of open-source software is insufficient. If the future of science depends on scientists’ use of open-source software, one can very well argue that colleges and universities are under a positive obligation to move away from closed-source computing infrastructures as well as closed- source software. Consider this: many of the instructions in computer programs do little more than issue directives to the operating system; this is done by means of the operating system’s application programming interface (API). To verify scientific software fully, the scientific community may need to examine the program’s interaction with the operating system. Yet Microsoft refuses to document the Windows API fully and regards the Windows source code as an immensely valuable trade secret. What is more, Microsoft has taken the lead i...