As for whether or not "legally binding" contracts/NDAs are used (that 
depends in part upon the nation under which legal system the 
collaborator may reside and/or that is providing the funding), the 
system is quite "political" and "power based", as indeed has appeared in 
a number of books.  For those who violate the rules, future funding is 
endangered, and for those who are post-docs or non-tenured "permanent" 
Faculty, the future "employment" in HEP greatly may be endangered. 
Shall I continue with the realities of the actual current HEP system 
(that has been in place since at least the Carlo Rubbia epoch).

As for the official analysis, my understanding is that the comment below 
is a reference to the specific, and possibly not fully released, 
software application program/s, utilities, and environment (e.g., RH 
linuxes) that is required by the rules of the collaboration.  Part of 
this requirement is proper software engineering to avoid (minimise) 
software defects.  However, even if the software source is released, the 
detailed data upon which the applications perform the "official 
analysis" typically is not available -- making "debugging" and 
verification outside the collaboration rather problematic.

On 3/5/21 5:31 PM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
> 
> To add. all official published results must be done using "official analysis",
> and for the purposes of this discussion, said "official analysis"
> often runs exclusively on RedHat-flavour linuxes.
> 
>>
>> Most HEP (and sometimes other) "academic" collaborations have
>> collaboration agreements for all member institutions (or groups or ...
>>
>> That was my meaning of NDA.
>>
> 
> That has nothing to do with Linux and Red Hat. I do not know
> why you bring it up. And you did not get it completely
> right, either. In Physics, we do not have to sign legal NDAs
> to participate in experiments and projects. It is basically
> an honor system, and everybody plays by the rules
> and/or breaks the rules per basic human nature. Books have
> been written about this stuff.
> 
> K.O.
> 
> On Fri, Mar 05, 2021 at 04:30:13PM -0800, Yasha Karant wrote:
>> Most HEP (and sometimes other) "academic" collaborations have
>> collaboration agreements for all member institutions (or groups or
>> individuals) that no work done by the collaboration may be published
>> or discussed without permission from the collaboration, typically a
>> set of PIs (often not a democratic vote -- one person whose name may
>> appear on the published papers or public presentations, one vote --
>> but rather some of the "group leaders" or the like).  These
>> limitations not only apply to announcement of research results, but
>> (often) deep details of the apparatus, that these days, can include
>> software, applications, and perhaps computer environments (e.g.,
>> modifications to an OS, special OS drivers for specific hardware,
>> etc.).  Once it has been decided that something can be released,
>> then it is -- equivalent to a NDA.  Typically again under this sort
>> of NDA, all of these details may be revealed to the funding
>> agency/ies (those who "pay the bills") but the agency has agreed not
>> to release this in public.  In the USA, save for classified
>> (weapons, clandestine services, etc.) material, those things
>> developed by Federal Government agencies are "public".
>>
>> That was my meaning of NDA.
>>
>> On 3/5/21 4:02 PM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
>>>> At some point ...
>>>
>>> Yasha you are writing some very strange stuff.
>>>
>>>> NDA collaboration contracts that exist for the various
>>>> CERN/Fermilab experiments ...
>>>
>>> if your NDA stands for "non-disclosure ...", then I must say that
>>> I do not believe there are any secret agreements between experiments
>>> and linux vendors. We do have NDAs with hardware vendors for
>>> access to secret documentation and secret firmware source code,
>>> but I never heard of any special agreements with any Linux vendors.
>>>
>>> if you know something we do not know, please tell us more.
>>>
>>>> ... Your observations on RHEL indicate that except for those
>>>> who license RHEL for fee with an IBM RH support contract, RHEL is
>>>> not an viable stable long-term (nor immediate) alternative.
>>>
>>> I must put it on record that I did not say any such thing.
>>>
>>> I say:
>>>
>>> a) RHEL8 is here and you can use it free of charge (16 free subscriptions)
>>> b) you can upgrade your CentOS-8 machine to RHEL8 with minimum trouble (I posted instructions on this list here)
>>> c) Red Hat made a serious mistake back in December by announcing "the end of CentOS as we know it" without providing (a) and (b) ahead of time
>>> d) by not providing 32-bit x86 and 32-bit ARM versions of RHEL they are at a severe disadvantage in places like a typical Physics lab (CentOS used to provide both, but they killed it).
>>>
>>> So there. There is nothing wrong with RHEL8. If it works for you, use it!
>>>
>