[dahart]

> Is the author still adding the "cite me or pay 10000€" notice to the output? And calling that GPL?

IIRC the citation notice was cleared by Stallman as GPL compatible. I’d be surprised if anyone’s paid, I assumed that’s rhetoric to imply the value of a citation, or lack of citation, for anyone publishing scientific works.

> These are just some of the reasons I’ll never use parallel.

Hey I’ve actually ranted on HN before about the citation notice (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15319715) - in part because I find the language of the notice a little misleading; it’s not tradition to write citations for tools used to conduct research, and it’s a requirement (not just tradition) to cite academic sources. If I used parallel to speed up some calculations, that doesn’t justify an academic citation. I don’t cite bash or python or C++ when I write papers either. On the other hand, if I’m writing a computer science paper about how to parallelize code, and especially if I compare it to GNU Parallel, then a citation isn’t optional, and I don’t need a guilt trip to add one, it’ll get requested in review, and rejected without. Is there even a journal publication to cite? (Edit: found it - the request is to cite an article in USENIX magazine.) So I find the notice a little irritating and I’m not sure who it’s aimed at exactly, or what the history of Ole feeling snubbed by scientists really is. Maybe some people were trying to compete with GNU Parallel and failing to cite it? Maybe Ole is paid by an organization that appreciates citations and will continue to fund development on Parallel if there’s evidence of it’s use in academia?

That said, GNU Parallel really is totally awesome, the documentation is amazing, and the citation notice is a one-time thing you can silence permanently. I don’t think the notice is a good reason to never use Parallel, and I do think Parallel is worth using, FWIW.

[thomasahle]

> it’s not tradition to write citations for tools used to conduct research.

Thia is true, but it also makes it very hard for academics and PhD students who mainly write software over papers. They get no citations and eventually have to leave academia.

If we had a better practice of citing central software we use - at least the academic software that wants to be cited - we could have a more flourishing ecosystem of such software funded by the universities.

[dahart]

I can understand that, and I can understand Ole’s request for citations - Googling him it looks like he is (or has been) employed by a university.

The good news is that the new ‘tradition’ these days for academic software is to open-source all the software written for a paper or academic project, so practically everything done is visible on github & arxiv.

[gorjusborg]

> They get no citations and eventually have to leave academia.

You're welcome?

Seriously though, adding the citation nag to software is two wrongs not making a right.

As a software user, it isn't my fault academia hasn't figured out how to reward software contribution. If they can't figure it out, finding a greener pasture makes a lot of sense.

[thomasahle]

> As a software user, it isn't my fault academia hasn't figured out how to reward software contribution.

If you're not writing papers, the citation notification isn't for you. Can't you just mute it and continue using the software without worries?

[gorjusborg]

> Can't you just mute it and continue using the software without worries?

It _seems_ like a reasonable thing to ask, it's a minor inconvenience, really, so what's the big deal?

The big deal is that the behavior doesn't fit the unix philosophy. Tools are meant to do one thing, and do it well. They get composed in pipelines to get jobs done. In these pipelines, the communication medium is text, via stdin/stdout/stderr. If a tool is unpredictable in what it puts out via text, it can make the whole pipeline unpredictable, or at least more complicated.

If it _was_ okay, we should welcome everyone putting nag features in these simple cli tools, right? Well, I'd be on board with that as long as I can blanket disable all of them. If not, let's just leave our political/professional/begging messaging outside our computing tools. Okay?

[specialist]

Like a colophon for research?

[foldr]

> it’s not tradition to write citations for tools used to conduct research

Academics seem to have a very blinkered attitude to this. I wrote some software that was popular for a while in a niche field, and people were forever asking me to waste my time by 'publishing' the manual in some pointless journal so that they could cite something and give me credit. Writing useful software counts for less in that world than publishing another pointless paper that no-one will read.

[Symbiote]

A more useful option is to use Zenodo to provide a DOI for a GitHub repository.

https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/archiving-a-github-r...

[foldr]

That doesn't really help. People already know how to paste the URL for a piece of software into a paper. It's more that it doesn't count for anything (because it's a piece of software and not a paper).

[Symbiote]

It does help, as the DOI system provides the tracking needed to count citations and measure the "effectiveness" of the researcher.

[foldr]

Such citations are not valued by $FIELD (for most values of FIELD). Only citations of published papers count.

[bee_rider]

That is a weird request, a source doesn’t need to be published in a journal to be cite-able. On the other hand, if you put a bibtex snippet on your site that indicates how you’d like to be cited, that is super helpful.

[foldr]

I wasn't very clear in my comment. I think the idea was that if the thing they were citing was a journal article, then the citations would actually mean something, as widely-cited journal articles are one of the currencies of most academic fields. While one certainly can cite an unpublished document, the author doesn't necessarily gain much from it in terms of their academic CV.

If someone writes a piece of software specifically for the purposes of doing certain types of scientific research, and then other scientists use this software to help conduct published experiments, then IMO it really ought to be possible to give that person meaningful credit for their work. It's a perfectly legitimate way to contribute to a field, even if it does not take the form of a paper. But with the system as it stands, the only way to get meaningful credit is to publish a pointless paper saying, in effect, "Hey! I wrote some software!"

>if you put a bibtex snippet on your site that indicates how you’d like to be cited, that is super helpful.

I should probably have done that, but from my point of view it didn't really matter. I have a name, and the software had a website. I didn't really mind exactly how individual people chose to cite it. The absence of a ready-baked bibtex snippet would never be accepted as an excuse for failing to cite any other kind of source.

[bee_rider]

I agree on all points, just trying to look at it from the other party’s point of view. But yeah, the situation with this sort of stuff is a pain.

There should be a high-prestige “journal of READMEs and User Handbooks,” haha.

[dahart]

Ole did provide a BibTeX entry to a USENIX magazine article about Parallel, which is fine, though I was always taught that non-journal references generally belong in footnotes or an appendix and not the bibliography, especially for something you’re not referencing for research purposes. Not sure if footnote or appendix or open-source usage citations count for what Ole needs; I’d guess he wants citations you can easily index using Google Scholar or other citation indexes, i.e. it should count toward Parallel’s H-index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index)

[rlpb]

> and the citation notice is a one-time thing you can silence permanently

This doesn't scale. Imagine if all the software you used nagged you and had their own individual methods to silence them. I don't think this would be reasonable.

What makes this particular software so special?

[repiret]

Lots of software nags with something when it first starts up. It’s mostly annoying, but doesn’t seem to have a scaling problem.

zsh gives you a config wizard, sudo admonishes you to use it responsibly, just about every iOS app and an increasing number of desktop apps gives you a few pages of “what’s new” every time they’re upgraded. Desktop apps have given tips-on-startup since the 90s.

[dahart]

I agree, and I think I might have even used this argument before. ;)

It does scale solely for GNU Parallel though for now, and very few other people have taken the same tack as GNU Parallel’s citation notice. Despite the potential for a slippery slope, it doesn’t seem to be happening. I’d speculate that if it did start to happen, then GNU would change their stance on what’s allowed by the license, perhaps.

[shakow]

> This doesn't scale.

--will-cite

[imtringued]

There is a difference between "will cite" and being in a situation that warrants citing.

[paulmd]

sure, but the other guy wants me to submit a picture in a funny hat, not a citation. and the third guy wants me to add some additional legal provisions and disclaimers to the GPL license.

you need a more generalized --clickwrap-consent parameter really. One that just says "whatever it is, I accept and I'll do it".

And that's exactly the thing GPL was supposedly founded to get away from. Restrictions on user freedoms. Especially violations so routine and tedious that we open-palm-slam "accept" without reading them.

You could absolutely write this to not look like a clickwrap agreement and lean on users. "please cite me, I'm an academic and impact matters" in the manfile or --help is not something anyone would ever get upset about or probably even patch to remove.

The only reason it's OK is because basically everyone knows it's not enforceable because of the severability part of the GPL. But it's blatantly designed to look like a serious and enforceable notice to users who don't know that, and require affirmative action from the user to "consent" and bypass the screen. And clickwrap agreements of this type are generally enforceable if there is not something like the GPL that allows you to ignore it.

like I flatly do not get why this is even debatable or questionable, the dude is trying to pull a fast one on users with a scary-sounding legal notice that implies that you need to accept this clickwrap agreement. and it's not entirely clear that he cannot actually burden you with this in all jurisdictions, since it's an agreement between you and the author that exists outside the actual source code/distribution. You can end up paying for free stuff in lots of places in life, if you're not aware about what "should" be free, and those agreements stand and are enforceable even though the thing was supposed to be free. You agreed to it. You don't have to, the GPL says that, you can edit the software to remove it without consenting, but you did accept it.

Letting the camel's nose under the tent on clickwrap agreements on GPL'd software is such an incredibly bad idea legally and morally, and this dude has been an utter dick about anyone who questions that. Sure, "he's willing to do it and nobody else is stepping up" but on the other hand he's also going off and attacking other maintainers doing their jobs, too. But that's not Stallman's problem I guess. That's another problem that only works with N=1 jerk, if that was normalized we'd have a problem.

I do not get why this guy is getting this special blessing or dispensation from FSF. Like it's not just that he's a random weirdo releasing under GPL and then trying to add additional terms (lol get stuffed), this is all occurring with the FSF's blessing, Stallman's signoff, and in the GNU distribution. Official GNU clickwrap license I guess.

At the end of the day - if the guy can't be satisfied with a polite request in the manfile, wow that sucks. But the GPL isn't about you, it's about the end user. There are explicitly licenses like BSD that require acknowledgement if that's your thing!

[Eiim]

Citing tools is maybe not tradition, but it's gaining popularity. R, for example, has 320,000 cites. (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1605575084878280829...)

[bluenose69]

It seems to me that citing R (or some other software tool) makes sense when it spares the author the task of providing detailed explanations.

Administrators who gauge work quality by counting citations are not helping the world much. Maybe it's time we started citing administrators who help us in our work ... so that their administrators can get rid of them if they are not helping. But of course I'm dreaming in technicolour -- administrators are never really subject to review, it seems.

[shakow]

> R, for example, has 320,000

Which is, to be frank, ridiculous compared to the number of papers it enabled.

[542458]

> IIRC the citation notice was cleared by Stallman as GPL compatible

Do you have a source for this? Im confused by this, as the GPL section 7 is pretty clear that additional restrictions are effectively void. I suppose it’s technically not contrary to the GPL to idly state those restrictions, but it is contrary to the GPL to expect them to do anything. If the author is deliberately including an impotent clause in the hope that people will follow it anyways, I feel that trying to confuse or scare people into doing something the GPL gives them explicit permission to do is contrary to the spirit of the GPL.

Furthermore, trying to retaliate against people who (as permitted by the GPL) remove the citation notice, as the author here has done, seems very contrary to the spirit of the GPL.

[dahart]

Here’s one source, there are several other places Ole has talked about it: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parallel.git/tree/doc/cita...

I think the confusing issue here is that the notice is not a license requirement, it does not add additional licensing restrictions. It’s an honor-system agreement between the user and Ole, and does not involve the GPL. It does seem to be walking a very fine line, and it’s easy for users to not understand the distinction, but I believe the notice does adhere to the GPL’s rules, even if it doesn’t initially appear to for us non-lawyers.

[542458]

Yes, to me it looks like he’s adding an official license-like note, but then declaring that he’s still GPL compliant because although his note is easily confused with a license it’s not actually a license. He then gets cranky if people remove his not-a-license note or don’t act like it’s a license. Feels very much to me like he’d be better served with something other than the GPL if he doesn’t want people using his software in GPL-permitted ways.

[flanked-evergl]

> IIRC the citation notice was cleared by Stallman as GPL.

I really hope that whomever adjudicate these disputes regarding licence agreements doesn't care what a random person says about it.

[DiggyJohnson]

It's disingenuous to say that Richard Stallman is a "random person" regarding the GPL.

[speedgoose]

I hope that Stallman’s future opinions have no impact of the GPL licensed software. He is the main author of the license but I wouldn’t bet that what he says years later have to be considered.

[grotorea]

But legally, does intention matter in either copyright or contract law? And specially someone who is neither licensee or licensor?

[dahart]

I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking. Why is the intention of the author of the license in question?

In this case, Stallman simply clarified that Parallel’s notice did not count as a legal requirement and does not conflict with the GPL. His opinion wasn’t necessary, but since he wrote the license, it is authoritative. In this case, the question wasn’t brought to court, it was simply a clarifying discussion, and thus his intention did affect how things go in practice.

> And specially someone who is neither licensee or licensor?

Also wasn’t Stallman effectively the licensor or representing the licensor at the time, as president of FSF, head of the GNU project, and author of the GPL?

[memefrog]

>His opinion wasn’t necessary, but since he wrote the license, it is authoritative.

No it isn't. Licences, like most legal documents, are construed objectively. The subjective intention of the author is totally irrelevant to the meaning.

[dahart]

You might have misunderstood what I said. It’s not up for debate whether RMS’s opinions or intent on the GPL have affected industry practice; that’s a fact of history. His statements on the GPL are authoritative in the sense that they may have prevented the courts from examining this question.

[hnfong]

RMS' comments and interpretations of the GPL have generally influenced how the industry deals with the GPL, and to the extent it has become de facto standard practice, the courts might take notice and take it into consideration.

Generally though, the contents of the text and (if applicable) case law surrounding its interpretation is more important.

[ruined]

the difference between law and code is the interpreter: law is interpreted by humans, significantly based on perceived intent, and code is interpreted by computers, which are expected to only act literally and deterministically.

[tshaddox]

“Arbitrary” is probably a better description than “random” here.

[DiggyJohnson]

I still disagree with arbitrary, just less strongly.

Whether his opinion on GPL is relevant, or if it is, how important it is, is up for debate. But I still don’t think it’s “based on a random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system”.

[flanked-evergl]

If the ride I'm on has the court asking Richard Stallman what he really meant in his heartest of hearts, I want off it.

[dahart]

What do you mean? Stallman adjudicates the disputes.

[dec0dedab0de]

I think disputes are handled between the author of the code and the user.

Stallman is rightfully the most prominent voice to comment on the spirit of the GPL/CopyLeft/Free Software.

[dahart]

You’re referring to a different kind of dispute than I (and parent) was talking about. In this case, Stallman did handle the dispute about whether GNU Parallel’s citation notice conflicted with the terms of the GPL.

[dec0dedab0de]

Okay that makes sense. You're saying that since the GPL itself is not open, that it needs Stallman's approval for modifications that are not explicitly allowed. And I was saying that it does not necessarily mean those modifications are enforceable between two parties in a random jurisdiction, which comes down to courts and whatnot.

[dahart]

Yes kind-of… in this case Parallel’s notice is not a modification of the license at all, and Stallman is the person who ruled on this question and confirmed this to be true. The GPL doesn’t prevent authors from including a notice, and having a notice doesn’t conflict with the terms of the GPL.

I feel like the whole problem here is that the legality of Parallel’s notice, and the separation of the notice from the GPL, is not at all clear. The language is confusing to users. People who take the license seriously are staying away from Parallel because of the fear of accidentally breaking the license terms.