>Things have changed since, but in my time, if a journal required source code for publication, most of the professors in my department would not have published there.
Even when they do require it, one of the problems for journals that require source code for publication is that there is little support for making sure that code actually works reliably. Reviewers often aren't obligated to look at code packages, and when they are, might not be expected to actually get anything running; they might not even have the resources to do so. I have done reviews where I have tried to get code to run, and oftentimes I feel like the code needs work not because of any malice, but simply because making a one-time code package that works, and continues to work, for others, over time, without updates, can be quite hard, especially when odd dependencies are involved. It's also not necessarily something related to normal reviewing of scientific content, but more things like insufficient dependency pinning, accidentally hard-coded paths, environment assumptions that worked for the authors but not the reviewers, etc.
Dealing with that process might actually be something that a journal could do as part of a publication fee, the way that some journals currently do visual editing of figures.
The sub-review process, when it works well, is arguably a reasonable one. To give the example of how this works from the perspective of the program committee of a conference I'm involved in:
The PC chairs assign papers to members of the PC. Those reviewers are ultimately responsible for the review quality and, a more frequent problem for the conference, ensuring the reviews are in on time. In principle, they can ask anyone to sub-review, but in practice, it usually goes to grad students, postdocs, or graduate alumni (and since we have a relatively light review load per member, we have many people who do all reviews themselves). The reviewers arguably know more about the expertise of their grad students and postdocs than the chairs doing the assignments do. Also unlike a journal, where editors might ask anyone with particular expertise, we both only assign reviews to PC members, and do assign them: PC members only get to state their preferences on what they would like to review. The sub-review process ideally lets reviewers ask people to do reviews who they know would be suited to a particular paper, but who might not be experienced enough to reasonably be on the PC itself with those responsibilities, and the chairs might not know much about. It then lets those reviewers look over the sub-reviewer's work directly, which might include mentoring them. While we do anonymous reviews, identities are visible to chairs, and one thing I've noticed when a chair, for example, is that grad student sub-reviewers often do excellent, thorough reviews, but also often lack the confidence to be sufficiently critical when writing about problems and weaknesses they identify, something that the reviewer can help with.
The review system (we use easychair) directly handles sub-reviewers, and our proceedings list all sub-reviewers (at least, those who actually submitted reviews). Good sub-reviewers can sometimes be reasonable candidates to ask to be on the PC the next year, and give a gentler, safer onramp: we're able to have a wider mix of junior and senior members when there are new postdocs (and I think in one case a grad student) who we already know do reliably good reviews and know our review process.
Something that is dismaying to me about this situation is that, on one hand, the anti-Collabora arguments are not unconvincing: the situation with Collabora and the foundation seems to have been dubious at best, and I would not be surprised if their legal worries are well-founded.
But on the other, in arguably trying to address the problems, the anti-Collabora side seems to exhibit a distressing lack of honor and decency. The dismissal of voting results that didn't go their way, the malicious misreadings of member votes against their proposals (eg, deciding "If the Board majority group insists on proceeding with this misguided and premature motion, I vote NO" was not a vote against the proposal because the motion was "neither misguided nor premature"), the arguments that complaints about their behavior violate community standards and are are not sufficiently respectful of the work they do, the toxic, patronizing, dismissive statements toward developers and others... even if they are right, I do not understand why they need to behave the way they are behaving.
The earlier threads from the Collabora side were also disappointing in how childish all of their arguments were structured. I read their posts and could barely understand what was being claimed in between all of the sarcasm and attacks, and I wasn't alone in the comments here.
From the outside, this entire situation is obviously very heated. What seems to be missing is some adults in the room who can turn down the tempers, get everyone to take a beat, and then start coming to some reasonable compromises.
Instead it feels like we're seeing the inevitable boiling over of passionate people who couldn't work well together and failed to find ways to cool off and work together.
AFAICT from TFA the arrangement with Collabra was illegal. I think the frustration was that there is no vote to be had on how to proceed in a way that
continues to be illegal. You can vote for a reform you can propose another actionable reform, or you can be thrown out.. And here we are?
It's strange. I started reading about this expecting that I'd support TDF's position against a company with a somewhat dubious open-non-open split, with a reasonable claim about conflict of interest, but the behavior of the TDF side seems sufficiently toxic that it's difficult to support them.
In similar behavior, one of the votes against the community bylaws that seem to have resulted resulted in the expulsions was "If the Board majority group insists on proceeding with this misguided and premature motion, I vote NO". Those in favor decided that the vote was conditional and not valid, because "this motion is neither misguided nor premature". They then proceeded to tell others complaining about the decision that they were violating community standards in doing so.
As far as I can tell, the invalidated vote made no difference to the outcome; it is difficult for me see a legitimate motivation for the interpretation of the vote.
Yeah, it's clear from reading things that there's a lot of personal animosity around all of this, and Italo Vignoli's resignation[1] makes it clear that everyone has mud all over themselves. But that said, it's almost impossible to read that voting exchange[2] as anything other than a deliberate and petty steamrolling of dissent by the current majority. Even being extremely charitable and supposing that the fact that not everyone is native to the english language, it seems impossible to reconcile the decision to not count this vote or record the dissenting comments because it was "unclear" with the supplied evidence that they recorded a similar dissenting "conditional" vote just weeks prior.
Follow on that with the removals from the members list (which as near as I can gather is removing eligible voters from the delayed but mandated upcoming BoD elections). And looking through some of the other recent discussion, if the TDF majority group was hoping to come out of this looking like they're on the side of angels, they might want to get a refund on those tarnished halos.
I do not know enough about this particular drama to have any opinion on the merits of the sides involved. However, I cannot help but notice the parallels with the infancy of TDF and the separation of LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org. In 2010, Oracle demanded the resignation of every TDF member from the OOo Community Council that was nominally its governance board; this constituted the removal of every community member (ie, non Oracle employee) from the council [1]; I don't know the full details of what happened after the meeting [2], but it seems like the TDF members refused to resign and that they were removed. The justification was quite similar to the justification here [3]: that the TDF members had a conflict of interest by virtue of being TDF members, and that they could continue to be involved if they left TDF.
Doesn't the AGPL specifically disallow that? If I understand correctly, the FSF has even directly threatened legal action against developers who add extra restrictions to the AGPL. The license text is copyrighted, does not allow modifications, and includes terms allowing the user to ignore any additional restrictions, so adding extra restrictions would seem to either be ineffective or a copyright violation.
OnlyOffice claims that additional terms fall under section 7 of AGPLv3, which explicitly allows adding such terms. I think the point of contention arises from the interpretation of section 7 and more specifically this sentence:
> When you convey a copy of a covered work, you may at your option remove any additional permissions from that copy, or from any part of it.
> In other words, AGPLv3 does not permit selective application: a recipient either accepts AGPLv3 in its entirety, including all additional conditions, or acquires no rights to use the software.
> Any removal, disregard, or unilateral “exclusion” of conditions imposed under Section 7 constitutes use beyond the scope of the granted license and therefore a breach.
That's about adding permissions -- not adding restrictions. There are a list of allowed restrictions in section 7, lettered A-F, and then the statement:
> All other non-permissive additional terms are considered "further restrictions" within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.
Yeah, b) does provide for attribution, which could be a valid claim here. But b) does not prohibit rebranding, nor does it require the use of branding to be used in any trade capacity as described under e).
Referring to a brand in the capacity of providing attribution is entirely different than using a brand in the capacity of trade. Attributing someone is not the same as using their trademark. Ever write a "works cited" at the end of a report in school? They aren't full of logos, they don't imply that you are the author, (they state the opposite) and they certainly don't violate any trade laws. They are literally just lists of attributions.
e.g. "This software is copyright OnlyOffice", or similar, is an attribution that does not violate any trademarks. It satisfies both b) and e). (although I will note that the license says "or" for each of those, but this probably isn't the intended interpretation)
I think you're confused by the term "permissions". You can give more freedom to the license and a copier can remove them as long as it doesn't remove the freedom that are in AGPLv3. The OnlyOffice team claim comes from the next paragraph of section 7:
> Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may [...] supplement the terms of this License with terms:
> b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it; or
c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from the original version; or
This is what they did and what the other part stripped from their blatant copy. So no, removing the logo or the OnlyOffice terms therefore seems forbidden by the license itself, revoking it for the other part, thus they are now making a counterfeit.
“Making exceptions to conditions” and “adding additional conditions” are literally opposed concepts, and the AGPL explicitly distinguishes between “additional permissions” and “further restrictions”. So, were OpenOffice bound by the original license without its additions, that would be problematic.
Author attribution, legally, doesn't refer to brands or logos. They're different things... e.g. the difference between [the disney logo] and "Copyright 2026 The Walt Disney Company"
It can disallow downstream licensees from doing things with it, it can't prevent the copyright holder and licensor.
> If I understand correctly, the FSF has even directly threatened legal action against developers who add extra restrictions to the AGPL. The license text is copyrighted, does not allow modifications, and includes terms allowing the user to ignore any additional restrictions, so adding extra restrictions would seem to either be ineffective or a copyright violation.
If it's a copyright violation of a copyright on the license, that has no effect on the effect of the license between the licensor and licensee, though it may result in money being owed by the licensor to the copyright holder on the license.
OTOH, I think any US court would find that a party trying to control the legal effect of licensing arrangements between third parties by leveraging a copyright on license text is, itself, a fairly strong indication that the particular use of the license text at issue is outside of the scope of copyright protection. That's not protecting expression, it is instead creating a roadblock to the freedom of contract.
Licenses are permissions to use a privilege which some legal rule (e.g., copyright) makes exclusive. You don't need a license when a work is out of copyright.
Its funny to be relying on copyright licenses when what people really want to to do is rewrite the law, but that's a different issue.
I'm saying the copyright on the license will expire, at which point the parts of the license that rely on its own copyright will no longer be enforceable.
Using Opus 4.6 for research code assistance in physics/chemistry, I've also found that, in situations where I know I'm right, and I know it has gone down a line of incorrect reasoning and assumptions, it will respond to my corrections by pointing out that I'm obviously right, but if enough of the mistakes are in the context, it will then flip back to working based on them: the exclamations of my being right are just superficial. This is not enormously surprising, based on how LLMs work, but is frustrating.
Short of clearing context, it is difficult to escape from this situation, and worse, the tendency for the model to put explanatory comments in code and writing means that it often writes code, or presents data, that is correct, but then attaches completely bogus scientific babbling to it, which, if not removed, can infect cleared contexts.
Flushing context is something i've found to be critical. If the cintect gets poisoned then you gotta start a new chat or it wont recover.
And you need to migrate the validated context from the old chat to the new one. For that it helps to hage it document the established and validated points as checkpoints.
A difficulty, too, is that choice of publishing venue is based on visibility and readership. And in my experience, EU-administered projects around scholarly publishing like these are well-meaning, but make baffling choices about focus, organization, and scope that hobble them.
Consider that this is a journal whose scope is defined not by field, but by funding initiatives. It places an astoundingly small emphasis on making research visible: contrasted with most major journals, with websites that might be split between research articles proper and editorial articles, but are still heavily focused on presenting articles, Open Research Europe doesn't have a single non-truncated article title on its front page, and devotes the vast majority of the page to journal administration and self-advertisement. The current lead highlight of PNAS is a section of rotating blurbs about articles, both research and editorial, for example. The current highlight of Open Research Europe is a description of Open Research Europe and logos of associated groups, including a second copy of the European Commission logo, in addition to the one on the top of the page. For that matter, the journal has a three-letter domain name, ore.eu, that it uses entirely to talk about itself, with only a single, small, text link to the journal itself. Why publish at a journal where your research seems to be far down their list of priorities?
With that said, I'm hopeful that CERN taking this over is a good sign. Zenodo is a great asset to the research community, and I feel like CERN is better situated to understand what will make a journal where researchers will want to publish. And I'd note, unlike Open Research Europe, Zenodo's front page is primarily a list of recent uploads, complete with partial abstracts.
>Researchers are themselves responsible for typesetting, advertising, etc. This and removing for-profit stakeholders can reduce the costs a lot.
That can depend on how the proceedings are published. Dagstuhl Publishing, for example, does do some typesetting and proofreading work for proceedings they publish, they just have it arranged in an extremely efficient way (everyone submits LaTeX using their class, so they're mostly fixing mistakes). They also do charge (an extremely small) publishing fee to the conference.
>They will spend it on anything but Firefox, which is the only thing anybody wants them to spend it on.
Mozilla certainly won’t spend it on Firefox, because the structure of the organization legally prohibits them from spending any of their donation money on Firefox. The ‘side projects’ are, at least officially, the real purpose of Mozilla.
They built the brand on Firefox then did a bait and switch. How many people who donate to Mozilla know that it's not helping Firefox?
But yeah, this is just how it works. Things can't stay good for too long. One must always be on the lookout for the new small thing that's not yet corrupted. Stay with it for a while until it rots, then jump to the next replacement.
Even when they do require it, one of the problems for journals that require source code for publication is that there is little support for making sure that code actually works reliably. Reviewers often aren't obligated to look at code packages, and when they are, might not be expected to actually get anything running; they might not even have the resources to do so. I have done reviews where I have tried to get code to run, and oftentimes I feel like the code needs work not because of any malice, but simply because making a one-time code package that works, and continues to work, for others, over time, without updates, can be quite hard, especially when odd dependencies are involved. It's also not necessarily something related to normal reviewing of scientific content, but more things like insufficient dependency pinning, accidentally hard-coded paths, environment assumptions that worked for the authors but not the reviewers, etc.
Dealing with that process might actually be something that a journal could do as part of a publication fee, the way that some journals currently do visual editing of figures.
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