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swcarpentry / modern-scientific-authoring

How to write, publish, and review scientific papers in the early 21st Century
http://swcarpentry.github.io/modern-scientific-authoring/
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Refrain from moral judgements #35

Open khinsen opened 8 years ago

khinsen commented 8 years ago

Under "The mess we are in", I found the statement

programmers might finally have the decency to pay attention to the document formats that the other 99% of the human race prefers

suggesting that a group of people vaguely identified as "programmers" are not behaving decently. This is an unproductive moral judgement. If desirable things don't happen, it's because nobody has the right mixture of motivation and means to make them happen. It's not a moral issue, but one of not sufficiently overlapping interests of different communities.

Earlier in the text, another accusation is less strong but goes along the same lines:

but there has still been plenty of time for command-line aficionados to adapt their favored tools to handle it. That hasn't happened, though, which means that most version control systems still can't handle the most widely-used documents formats in the world

Why should "command-line aficionados" be morally obliged to invest a lot of effort to integrate Word files into their toolchains?

There is also an important technical point missing from this discussion: Early Word formats are proprietary, and the latest one is pseudo-open, meaning that it's documented but so complex that nobody other than Microsoft ever managed to produce a fully compatible implementation.

In fact, as an adept of openness in all aspects of science, I wouldn't even consider Microsoft Word as a candidate for scientific authoring because of its file format. I'd much prefer the Open Document Format as used in Open/Libre Office as the WYSIWYG candidate. I agree that SWC should not take sides in the WYSIWYG vs. plain text debate, but it should warn against proprietary data formats and suggest open alternatives.

wking commented 8 years ago

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 12:14:26AM -0800, Konrad Hinsen wrote:

Under "The mess we are in", I found the statement

programmers might finally have the decency to pay attention to the document formats that the other 99% of the human race prefers

suggesting that a group of people vaguely identified as "programmers" are not behaving decently. This is an unproductive moral judgement.

Duplicate of #15?

… but it should warn against proprietary data formats and suggest open alternatives.

This sounds like a reasonable position to me. It's flirting with advocating FLOSS, and while I personally support free software for ethical reasons 1, I think a SWC pitch (if any) should focus on FLOSS for practical reasons (e.g. archival access). See 2 for some notes on the distinction in motivation, and some cases where the distinction leads to different actions.