Here’s an article that I think may interest some of the people here:
17 Likes
The security implications of this should be obvious to anyone, yet government organizations, while adhering minutely to security rituals with questionable efficacy, permit their installation.
Well articulated, I especially like the phrase “security rituals”. Parallel to but distinct from “security theatre”.
Both aim to give the appearance of security and considered caution (with dubious match to reality), but security theatres are targeted down at the general public, whereas security rituals are targeted up towards management and the legal system.
2 Likes
I like that the article maintains a pragmatic thread throughout: it’s not just a theoretical argument, you give pratical advice and pointers at every stage to the tools available and their scope.
In that pragmatic spirit, one thing I’d like to have seen is some small discussion of the features/toolboxes/libraries that are the attraction of proprietary tools for a lot of researchers, and how to replace them.
There’s some inertia here - the free software side has come leaps and bounds in the last couple decades, but many researchers are stuck with their old belief that the libraries they need are only in proprietary software. But there’s also some genuine differences still, depending on the fields or the particular features required.
(As an aside, this article comment section seems to be LWN at its best, with genuine discussion and thoughtful replies to a more-than-usual level.)
Sticking with proprietary software isn’t just inertia, proprietary software has a financial sustainability advantage over FOSS. It’s not great when a widespread dependency suddenly can’t keep up with the ecosystem because the development team needed different jobs to pay the bills. There’s no shortage of FOSS with robust finances, often via ties to tech companies that use it, but there’s also tons of proprietary software that rely on sales. I don’t think anybody prefers to pay period, but when there are stakes, they’d choose faster improvements and longer product lifespans, and that more often than not involves payment.
3 Likes
…semi-comical sight of someone running around knocking on office doors, trying to find out who was using (or had left running) a copy of the program that they desperately needed to use to meet some deadline—but were locked out of.
Now imagine somebody took a company’s car and didn’t bring it back, while you desperately need it. I don’t see any difference. In both case it is just the responsibility of the company to establish processes for that not to happen.
- Ease of use, which includes
– support,
– documentation,
– user interface, esp. GUI, - Commitment by the software vendor
Concerning ease of use: Even if the autor of a package really invests his time into documentation (which many don’t), not always he’d be able to get it well. Technical writer is quite a different profession from software developer. User interface designer is still another one. Companies have such people.
Anybody has a reasonable replacement to Origin for plotting?
P.S. I definitely didn’t mean Origin as an example of great software.