On Fri, Mar 5, 2021 at 8:31 PM Konstantin Olchanski <[log in to unmask]> 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.

There are often quite potent contracts, with universities, private and
public funding agencies, and your agreements with whoever gives you
office space to work in, maybe a salary, and maybe a computer account
or library privileges. Human nature is devious, duplicitous, and
deceitful, it's at the core of how we manage the world.It is human
nature that we create agreements, sometimes quite elaborate and
complex, to manage the deceit and theft and abuse that are so often
part of human nature. It's why we, and yes, I'll include myself as a
physicist from my work with building the first safe cochlear
stimulators for use in MRI's, have peer review.   We weren't trusted,
that involved a great deal of deep suspicion, and some department
heads having to recuse themselves because they had a stake in the
experiment. It worked *very* well, by he way. We got great images of
how sound perception actually propagates through the human brain from
only one ear, fascinating stuff that you cannot normally do with an
MRI because they go "PING! PING! PING! PING! PING! PING!" and
overwhelm hearing in both ears.