In this regard I find medical papers much better than CS ones. The ones in medicine in the abstract write the methodology, the results the CI (confidence interval) and the conclusions.
The rendering engine: Chromium had to be kept "libre", because khtml/Webkit was LGPL.
The browser: Chrome. could be kept closed because the LGPL allow the integration of libre libraries in closed products as long as the library itself remains "libre". In this case the library is the renering engine: Chromium.
As a counter example MacOS was built on top of decades of work on the BSD operating system and Apple is under no obligation to give the code back to the BSD project... and it doesn't.
So the most valuable company in the planet took from the community and it doesn't bother to give back.
Both companies did the bare minimum demanded by the respective license, its just that one license forces a bit more as bare minimum. Think. What does this mean?
If you use a license that demands even more, you could have pressurized the companies to behave even nicer.
Which would raise the bar for them requiring them to spend efforts writing it in house or procuring similar elsewhere. The more polished and complex a package is that is hard to find alternatives for, the better the leverage.
Yes, forced to follow. Its a sign in retrospect that KDE should have used an even stronger license. I don't know if AGPL existed then, but if I start a browser today, I'd license it as AGPL. If you want to use the project, you have to release your changes to your users. If you don't want to do that, good luck, spend millions on developing an equivalent application in house. Thats the beauty of GPL like licenses.
With BSD companies are under no obligation to release their changes, and like any self interested party, most don't.
The parent said GPL, which is what got me confused. LGPL makes more sense.
Although... this still doesn't explain why the other parts of the browser besides the rendering engine are open source? i.e. if the license was the reason, then presumably Google would've made the rest of the browser closed source, but that wasn't the case for most parts.
It happens extremely frequently because there is almost no downside for management to override the engineers decision.
Even in the case of the Challenger, no single article say WHO was the executive that finally approved the launch.
No body was jailed for gross negligence.
Even Ricahrd Feynman felt that the investigative comission was biased from the start.
So, since there is no "price to pay" to make this bad calls they are continuously made.
Jailing people means you'll have a hard time finding people willing to make hard decisions, and when you do, you may find they're not the right people for the job.
Punishing people for making mistakes means very few will be willing to take responsibility.
It will also mean that people will desperately cover up mistakes rather than being open about it, meaning the mistakes do not get corrected. We see this in play where manufacturers won't fix problems because fixing a problem is an admission of liability for the consequences of those problems, and punishment.
Even the best, most conscientious people make mistakes. Jailing them is not going to be helpful, it will just make things worse.
Have you ever made a mistake on the road that luckily did not result in anyone getting killed?
During WW2, a B-19 crash landed in the Soviet Union. The B-29's technology was light-years ahead of Soviet engineering. Stalin demanded that an exact replica of the B-29 be built. And that's what the engineers did. They were so terrified of Stalin that they carefully duplicated the battle damage on the original.
Be careful what you wish for when advocating criminal punishment.
Tu-4 was indeed a very close copy of B-29, but no, they did not "carefully duplicate the battle damage" on the original. The one prominent example of copying unnecessary things that is usually showcased in this instance is a mistakenly drilled rivet hole in one of the wings that was carefully reproduced thereafter despite there not being any evident purpose for it.
That said, even then Tu-4 wasn't a carbon copy. Because US used imperial units for everything, Soviets simply couldn't make it a carbon copy because they could not e.g. source plating and wire of the exact right size. So they replaced it with the nearest metric equivalents that were available, erring on the side of making things thicker, to ensure structural integrity - which also made it a little bit heavier than the original. Even bigger changes were made - for example, Tupolev insisted on using existing Soviet engines (!), weapons, and radios in lieu of copying the American ones. It should be noted that Stalin really did want a carbon copy originally, and Tupolev had to fight his way on each one of those decisions.
We should not blame people for honest mistakes. Challenger was not an honest mistake, it was political pressure overriding engineering. The joints were not supposed to leak at all, yet they were leaking every time and it was being swept under the rug. When someone suddenly demands to get it in writing when it was normally a verbal procedure they *know* there's a problem. That's not a mistake.
Same as the insulation damage to the tiles kept being ignored until Columbia barely survived. And then they fixed the part they blamed for that incident, but the tiles kept coming back damaged.
And look at what else was going wrong that day--the boosters would most likely have been lost at sea if the launch had worked.
From the very start they were obviously in cover-up mode.
They had every engineer involved with the booster saying launching in the cold was a bad idea, yet they started by trying to look at all the ways it could have gone wrong rather than even looking into what the engineers were screaming about.
We also have them claiming a calibration error with the pyrometer (the ancestor of the modern thermometer you point at something) even though that made other numbers not make sense.
I had never seen anyone who is more obviously a psychopath than this guy.
You know that theory that people like that gravitate towards management positions? Yeah... it's this guy. Literally him. Happy to send people into the meat grinder for "progress", even though no actually scientific progress of any import was planned for the Challenger mission. It was mostly a publicity stunt!
Emacs... it's likean extension of my brain ar this point. It allows me to record my thoughts org-mode, draw (plantuml), take notes of whay I learn (org-roam) and program.
My silent Bosch dishwasher... everytine I don't do the dishes... a say a little prayer for the engineers that built it.
It was a long tine ago that I was in academia, but the advice that I would hibe an student today would be:
use beeminder.com to set a bet to yourself to write 500 words daily... on anything... just the habit of writing is extremely important. Try to use the 5 paragraph esssay or the a logical tree exposition.
Use org-roam for a zettlekastem notes (that count to the 500 word limit)
And trying to use Literate programming (org-babel) to make your articles reproducible.
Use nixos in your personal computer so that you can control exactly what dependencies and libraries your papers need.
> Use org-roam for a zettlekastem notes (that count to the 500 word limit
It isn't necessarily in the spirit of your post, but online kanban-like boards and zettelkasten notes are another option for those who aren't technically or have one or more coauthors.
In 2010s they still were, but with "relational database" part swapped out for something worse still.
If you squint, you can just see many webapps as taking what would work better as a bunch of MS Access forms, and locking it down from every possible side so that there's a directed flow users can't deviate from, and so that they can't possibly do anything with their data that the webapp owners don't allow.
I wish papers were written in html or markdown... and the beautiful typography applied later with latex.