
The CRAPL: An academic-strength open source license (2010) - _ZeD_
http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/
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ngoldbaum
I really don't like seeing people advocate using this license or any other
non-free license. The whole point of making analysis code available is to aid
reproducibility _and future research_ , but this license explicitly forbids
reuse of code for anything other than peer review or validation.

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JesperRavn
Good catch. Academia seems like the strangest place for people to be
especially possessive over the IP they produce, since the actual knowledge the
produce is generally intended to be shared freely and used for any purpose.
And yet academia seems to push for patents for their ideas (admittedly these
ideas tend to be less obvious than the patents coming from industry) and non-
commercial licenses for their software. I think it's time for academia to
reevaluate what their purpose is, and whether sharing software and
implementation details should be considered as essential as sharing ideas.

I personally think that academia should use _permissive_ licenses, since they
are primarily funded by the government, and so the software should be
available to all without restriction, just as scientific knowledge is. But I
guess that depends on your views on software "freedom" (which I characterize
as the belief in _natural right_ to modify and copy software that one owns).

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ngoldbaum
Another common weird academic license issue I've run into is people making up
licenses to try to enforce academic norms about citations. Usually in these
cases there will be a term in the license that requires a citation in any
paper that gets written about data processed by the code.

Since it make it legally questionable to use the code (what if I forget to
cite them? Will they sue me?), fewer people will want to use it, making the
whole exercise of publicly releasing the code less useful overall.

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tjradcliffe
This is a worthy initiative because academics really are shy about releasing
crap code, and yet access to other people's code can be critical in
understanding why their results differ from yours. It can save a lot of
headache.

But it's also a demonstration of two ancient adages:

1) Developers should not name projects for the same reason marketing people
should not write code

2) Legally binding instruments should be written by people with legal
training. It doesn't have to be lawyers, but people who at least know enough
that "By reading this sentence you have agreed to donate your body to science"
or similar is not going to fly.

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kctess5
I feel that the title is somewhat misleading.

"[1]Open source software is software that can be freely used, changed, and
shared (in modified or unmodified form) by anyone. Open source software is
made by many people, and distributed under licenses that comply with the Open
Source Definition."

IANAL, but a cursory glance shows that this license is (probably) not
compliant with terms {1, 3, 4, 5, 6} of the Open Source Definition[2].
Therefore, I would file this license in the non-open source file cabinet.

[1] [http://opensource.org/](http://opensource.org/) [2]
[http://opensource.org/definition](http://opensource.org/definition)

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haddr
sorry for not too constructive comment, but the acronym of the license brings
some negative connotation to my mind...

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WD-42
Are you aware of what most academic code looks like? The name is fitting.

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haddr
haha, I know it, anyway I still have difficulty imangining the situation when
you go to your prof. and say: how about releasing our work as CRAPL?

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zitterbewegung
If I know about licences why would I use this over BSD/GPL? Also this licence
introduces incredibly vague parts and seems to be more of a joke licence than
anything.

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vacuo
I must say, I have never seen this in a license before...

1\. By reading this sentence, You have agreed to the terms and conditions of
this License.

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solomatov
This looks like a joke.

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ngoldbaum
Sadly not a joke:
[https://github.com/search?q=crapl&type=Code&utf8=%E2%9C%93](https://github.com/search?q=crapl&type=Code&utf8=%E2%9C%93)

