The CRAPL: An academic-strength open source license (2010) | Hacker News Reader

The CRAPL: An academic-strength open source license (2010)

matt.might.net

26 points_ZeD_14 comments

I really don't like seeing people advocate using this license or any other non-free license. The whole point of making analysis code available is to aid reproducibility and future research, but this license explicitly forbids reuse of code for anything other than peer review or validation.

Good catch. Academia seems like the strangest place for people to be especially possessive over the IP they produce, since the actual knowledge the produce is generally intended to be shared freely and used for any purpose. And yet academia seems to push for patents for their ideas (admittedly these ideas tend to be less obvious than the patents coming from industry) and non-commercial licenses for their software. I think it's time for academia to reevaluate what their purpose is, and whether sharing software and implementation details should be considered as essential as sharing ideas.

I personally think that academia should use permissive licenses, since they are primarily funded by the government, and so the software should be available to all without restriction, just as scientific knowledge is. But I guess that depends on your views on software "freedom" (which I characterize as the belief in natural right to modify and copy software that one owns).

Another common weird academic license issue I've run into is people making up licenses to try to enforce academic norms about citations. Usually in these cases there will be a term in the license that requires a citation in any paper that gets written about data processed by the code.

Since it make it legally questionable to use the code (what if I forget to cite them? Will they sue me?), fewer people will want to use it, making the whole exercise of publicly releasing the code less useful overall.

I think the idea is that the code is so crappy that they don't want people to do anything with it other than read it.

This is a worthy initiative because academics really are shy about releasing crap code, and yet access to other people's code can be critical in understanding why their results differ from yours. It can save a lot of headache.

But it's also a demonstration of two ancient adages:

1) Developers should not name projects for the same reason marketing people should not write code

2) Legally binding instruments should be written by people with legal training. It doesn't have to be lawyers, but people who at least know enough that "By reading this sentence you have agreed to donate your body to science" or similar is not going to fly.

I feel that the title is somewhat misleading.

"[1]Open source software is software that can be freely used, changed, and shared (in modified or unmodified form) by anyone. Open source software is made by many people, and distributed under licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition."

IANAL, but a cursory glance shows that this license is (probably) not compliant with terms {1, 3, 4, 5, 6} of the Open Source Definition[2]. Therefore, I would file this license in the non-open source file cabinet.

[1] http://opensource.org/ [2] http://opensource.org/definition

sorry for not too constructive comment, but the acronym of the license brings some negative connotation to my mind...

I'm pretty sure that's intentional. The point of the license is for releasing crappy code that is still necessary for the research in question and validating the findings.

Are you aware of what most academic code looks like? The name is fitting.

haha, I know it, anyway I still have difficulty imangining the situation when you go to your prof. and say: how about releasing our work as CRAPL?

If I know about licences why would I use this over BSD/GPL? Also this licence introduces incredibly vague parts and seems to be more of a joke licence than anything.

I must say, I have never seen this in a license before...

1. By reading this sentence, You have agreed to the terms and conditions of this License.

This looks like a joke.

Sadly not a joke: https://github.com/search?q=crapl&type=Code&utf8=%E2%9C%93

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