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Design of GNU Parallel (2015)

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Re: Design of GNU Parallel (2015)

#71

Post by ketzu »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #59
ketzu wrote: post #16

This was quite interesting to look through! Perl 5.8.0 is over 20 years old ( https://dev.perl.org/perl5/news/2002/07/18/580ann/ ) while centOS 3.9 was released in 2007! At the same time it seems not-that-old and ancient. My personal anecdote with gnu parallel was running into it while working in academia. It worked well and saved me some time, but I felt that it was unreasonable of a tool to ask for a citation to pa…

It's a request, not a requirement. I see nothing wrong with the request nor if an individual decides to not cite it due to their principles/judgement.

As I said, I think it is okay for authors to make any request they want, it is their software after all.

But I still think making citation for gnu parallel is unreasonable. There is a huge body of software, of which gnu parallel is probably the least important, that contributed to (at least my) research. Blowing up citation lists with those makes the citation list borderline useless.

It makes citations into advertising space for software - it's bad enough being coerced to make it an advertisement for reviewers papers.

Re: Design of GNU Parallel (2015)

#72

Post by malborodog »

RhysU wrote: post #39
hexane360 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nonsense because the standard in academic settings is to cite works which contribute scientifically to the current work, not merely utilities. If I publish a paper on a command line tool for parallel processing, inspired by features from GNU parallel, I would cite GNU parallel. But if I'm doing (for instance) computational biology work, I'm not going to cite: - the Linux kernel - Python - Matlab - GNU parallel -…

> It's nonsense because the standard in academic settings is to cite works which contribute scientifically to the current work, not merely utilities. Whether or not it's standard is irrelevant. Ole asked you to cite him if you use it. So, if you publish academically, either don't use it or cite him. If not using GNU Parallel hinders your science then the tool must be material to your work flows. For comparison, how m…

Or ya know, just use it and don't cite him?? Seems pretty easy!

Re: Design of GNU Parallel (2015)

#73

Post by rockwotj »

adastra22 wrote: post #70
rockwotj wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I had 16 cores and I gave up on the this version after several minutes. I don't remember the disk throughput difference but it was significant

This should be I/o limited though.

It was a NVMe disk, so it required all cores to saturate the device

Re: Design of GNU Parallel (2015)

#74

Post by caro11ne »

RhysU wrote: post #19
chungy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully both Debian and Arch patch out the citation nonsense.

It is "nonsense" because...? A) You don't understand. Please read the "Citation notice" section in the article. B) You understand but don't use GNU Parallel. C) You understand and use GNU Parallel in a non-academic setting and find the hassle of supplying --no-notice to be onerous vs the effort to write/maintain your own tool. D) You understand and use GNU Parallel in an academic setting and have cited Ole or plan to…

Is this not covered in depth in the f.a.q? https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parallel.git/tree/doc/cita...

Re: Design of GNU Parallel (2015)

#75

Post by hexane360 »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #60
hexane360 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nonsense because the standard in academic settings is to cite works which contribute scientifically to the current work, not merely utilities. If I publish a paper on a command line tool for parallel processing, inspired by features from GNU parallel, I would cite GNU parallel. But if I'm doing (for instance) computational biology work, I'm not going to cite: - the Linux kernel - Python - Matlab - GNU parallel -…

> GNU parallel wants to treat it like a requirement of using the software I have never felt this, and that is not how FOSS works. By definition, they cannot restrict how you use the software. Thus, the citation request is just a request. Hypothetically, you could slander and ruin the author's life (the extreme polar opposite of a citation) and still freely use the software. This is no different than an author asking…

>that is not how FOSS works

Right, and that's what the rest of my sentence was meant to convey. However, the author goes to great extent to obfuscate this fact, as this faq demonstrates: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parallel.git/tree/doc/cita...

Not once in that 2000-word rant does Ole outright state that citation is entirely voluntary, and not a condition of the license. Instead, he describes the notice's "GPLv3 compatibility" in a way that incorrectly states you must either respect the license notice or treat the software as it is not open-source. He also responds with vitriol to people who do choose to fork his software, as evidenced here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=905674

I wouldn't have a problem with the program's current behavior if it simply made you type 'i understand' instead of 'will cite', and made clear that it was a non-binding request. As is, the program attempts to sound like a license agreement while Ole insists to maintainers it is not.

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