Nature Editorial: If you want reproducible science, the software needs to be open source
Nature Editorial: If you want reproducible science, the software needs to be open source
Another justification for keeping code closed is selfish: to slow down the competition by keeping the results of hard work to yourself. Daniel Lemire, a computer scientist and professor, responded to this argument elsewhere by pointing out that open sourcing his code not only makes his work repeatable, but spreads the ideas faster and makes the code better in the long run, since other users can help debug it.
