(no title)
sidww2
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12 years ago
I don't think forcing potential users to compile a program is going lower the barrier much. A lot of the users could be biologists and they would likely not know how to compile the source. I do agree that the software should be open source.
burntsushi|12 years ago
In my experience, biologists are allergic to the command line. They need web interfaces.
In the case where they don't mind using the command line, providing Linux x64 binaries (along with the source) is plenty sufficient.
Note that I'm not saying they shouldn't distribute the jar if that's the kind of game they want to play. I'm saying they shouldn't restrict themselves to distributing a jar.
> I do agree that the software should be open source.
Me too. But it's not an ideological point. I wasn't kidding when I said that, in all probability, I'll have to fix whatever software I'm using. Or at the very least, read the source code to understand what it is that they've implemented. (You'd think it'd be clear from the methods section in their paper...)
/rant