Hi Rogerio,
I am writing in support of the recent patch to remove the citation
message from Debian's version of GNU Parallel. This citation
solicitation is actually quite troubling from an academic perspective,
not just from a licensing standpoint.
The assertion of Mr. Tange, the upstream author, that "[a]cademic
tradition requires you to cite works you base your article on" is true,
however the active words here are "works" and "base". In this case,
when writing an article, the nature of the "work" I would base my
article on would be another article. An academic article (in general)
is not inherently based on the work of the programmer who wrote some of
the software infrastructure used to create or analyze the data. Mr.
Tange's assertion that mere use of GNU Parallel constitutes a moral
obligation to cite an entry-level self-help tutorial on how to use that
software is an egregious mischaracterization of the academic tradition
Mr. Tange relies on. Especially, in this case, where the software in
question has nothing to do with data analysis or production, but is a
middleware parallelization job scheduler. If the article in question is
itself on middleware parallelization job schedulers, that's one thing.
In virtually every other case the notice is just fishing for something
that is highly inappropriate. The correct way of mentioning the
software involved is in a footnote, or perhaps in an appendix, when
describing how to replicate the results and analysis. You include
scripts involved, and the "evidence chain" of the data in such a way.
This is problematic for Mr. Tange, however, because footnotes are not
tracked. Citations are. Which is clearly why he is fishing for them.
Now, the above isn't Debian's problem. This is academia's problem.
What is Debian's problem is what will happen if Mr. Tange convinces
Debian leadership that the citation-begging notice has to be allowed
back in. Because this will open the flood gates to everyone who wants
the prestige of being cited in an academic journal. All you have to do
is have a minor article on a piece software, it doesn't have to be an
academic article - just a how to use it will do, published literally
anywhere that is citable, for any software in the processing-chain
commonly used in academia. Use a shell script, be prepared to have the
Bash authors start putting in citation-begging notices. Arguably those
that wrote the actual Linux task schedulers and SMP code are just as
worthy of notice as the authors of GNU Parallel. Or GCC, or PERL, or
Python. Or how about grep? If this citation-begging notice gets back
in to Debian, it will become a far larger issue than just whether or not
Mr. Tange is skating on the right side of the GPL/DFSG legalities.
Debian is going to have to ask the question on whether advertising in a
STDERR message is appropriate at all.
I would ask you, if and when this comes up for review with the
leadership at Debian, to bring up these issues. It is my hope that
Debian will see that it is in their best interest to look at a policy
that will exclude this kind of behaviour, before it spreads.
Thank-you
Regards,
Kurt Fitzner
