Where do paid‑for development environments sit?
This debate essentially settles on the degree to which financial cost provides a barrier to open source development.
The underlying hardware must also be purchased and my aging Intel i7 laptop cost around € 1500 when new. Access to power and internet provision are also necessary and again must be paid for. Moreover, neither of these services is necessarily stable in the parts of the global south.
The four freedoms (cited earlier) were formulated when all substantial software was written in compiled languages like C. To my knowledge, all the common compiled languages have open‑source development environments. The use of proprietary interpreters, such as GAMS and Matlab, essentially represent corner‑cases in terms of free software.
It is debatable, in my view at least, whether the four freedoms mandate that the entire development stack be free of financial cost. The source code for the program must be accessible and provided under an OSI‑approved open license. But those open source licenses are also intentionally silent on the question of pricing, although charging for code is obviously impracticable beyond the first hop. Of course the use of free (as‑in‑freedom) software interpreters, like Python, is far more preferable over relatively expensive proprietary interpreters, like GAMS.
There are also occasionally other considerations that arise. MATLAB was recently subject to US sanctions concerning two Chinese universities.
Research funding policies
Much of what happens in our domain is dependent on research funding policies. And while there is a general shift towards open source by default, it seems unlikely that open‑source development environments would ever be mandated by funding agencies. In regards funding policy in Germany, this 2022 document from the federal economics ministry (BMWK) is instructive (only in German unfortunately):
- BMWK (November 2022). Eckpunktepapier Open Science in der Energiesystemanalyse. Berlin and Bonn, Germany: Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz (BMWK). 4 pages.
Open‑source is the default, while this part covers opt‑outs (unofficial translation):
No obligation to OS [open science]: In justified exceptional cases, for example projects with interesting real use cases and sensitive data contributions from practice partners or with commercial exploitation interests in the model (for example in consulting companies), there should be no obligation to OS exploitation. However, minimum transparency standards alternative to OS, such as the creation of so-called factsheets, are mandatory."
This BMWK document was earlier discussed on the openmod mailing list as follows: