Open v. Closed Source-Climate Change Research

theidocles writes "The ongoing debate over the 'hockey stick' climate graph has an interesting side note. McKitrick & McIntyre (M&M), the critics, have published their complete source code and it's written using the well-known R statistics package (covered by the GPL). Mann, Bradley & Hughes, the defenders, described their algorithm but have only released part of their source code, and refuse to divulge the rest, which really makes it look like they have some errors/omissions to hide (they did publish the data they used). There's an issue of open source vs closed source as well as how much publicly-funded researchers should be required to disclose - should they be allowed to generate 'closed-source' solutions at the taxpayers' expense?"

It should be called argh!

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate projects with names like R. I used R a while back, and it's a great program, but try searching for "R" plugins on Google. Not fun.

Re:It should be called argh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Searching for LaTeX, on the other hand...

too good to be true

[Anonymous Coward]

This article has the potential for 2 flamewars. For or against global warming and for or against open source. Oh joy!

Legal

[Anonymous Coward]

This is actually an interesting legal debate. How would you register a trademark on the letter R?

R®????