If you don't know what @home projects are, they're distributed computing platforms where you can use the processing power of your computer to contribute to some field of research. Basically, you just download a software client that runs on your computer, it looks at your computer hardware, and it communicates with a server which sends you little programs (called "work units" or "WU"s) from a much more massive computer program that your CPU and/or GPU crunches the results for and sends back to the main server. They can be configured to run when your computer is idle if you wish, so that you don't notice the effects of the calculations on your everyday computer use. Some examples are Folding@home, Einstein@home, Milkyway@home, and many others. With Folding@home, the crowdsourced calculations are used to study protein folding; with Einstein@home and Milkyway@home, the calculations are doing physics research and mapping the galaxy. Very noble goals - I have no problem with the core idea of @home projects at all and I really respect and cherish them as an easy and effective way to reach supercomputer levels of processing speed as an independent researcher or group of researchers at a university without a big budget. It's really a fantastic idea. Folding@home is (or at least was, last time I checked) the biggest supercomputer in the world in terms of processing power.
I specifically listed the three projects that I have contributed processing power to in the last section: Folding@home, Einstein@home, and Milkyway@home. As much as I think Folding@home has the most useful and practical goal of the three in terms of the betterment of humanity through medical research, I now refuse to ever contribute processing time to the project. The reason is that Folding@home, for absolutely no reason I can think of besides greed, has chosen to keep both the client and server of the project proprietary software. Einstein@home and Milkyway@home, in contrast, are both libre software under the GPL license.
I simply don't understand it. Why would a piece of technology that's being used, ostensibly, for real medical breakthroughs, be proprietary? If the goal is to discover medical knowledge for the benefit of mankind, using ordinary people's computers to calculate it, how is it a good thing for the software itself to be unavailable for others to learn from? They've even gone to the trouble of convincing another LGPL project concerning molecular bonding to give them a proprietary license for their library, thereby circumventing a situation by which they would have been compelled to share source code. This type of greed and outright malice is telling the world that making important global medical software and medical breakthroughs entirely secret has no moral dilemma, when it has a massive one. I strongly, strongly disagree with this viewpoint. The way they address the issue on the above-linked page, confusingly titled "OpenSource" when the program is not at all open source or libre, is by bringing up the single notion that making the client software open source would make it easier for people to cheat the high score system where people compete to have the most calculations. Is a gimmick high score system - which could still work while being open source, mind you, that's just an excuse - worth making the entire client of the project proprietary? There's something else about the way the section is written which just makes it seem like it's talking down to you for daring to want to know how the largest supercomputer in the world works. The title to the section is "Isn't GROMACS a GPL'd code? Where's the source code for your mods?" which is such a strange way of writing that, like it's almost purposefully written to sound dumb to downplay the intelligence of people who ask, rightly, why the project is not libre. I don't even think GROMACS is released under the GPL now, it's released under the LGPL, so it doesn't even require Folding@home to release the source code of their entire project, just GROMACS, and they still tried to avoid it tooth and nail. Still, the faux-question is still stupid, especially since it doesn't even get the license of the software right.
In contrast, Einstein@home and Milkyway@home have extensive, GPL-licensed source code for both the server and client sides of the projects. The hub through which they're accessed, BOINC, is also an LGPL program itself, and depending on the @home project you're computing there is full GNU/Linux support available, meaning that it is possible to contribute using entirely libre software. These projects respect you as a user and as a researcher by allowing you to see what they're running on your system, and allowing others to create similar projects based on their work. They are not restricting others from contributing to the greater world of science in any way.
The only caveat I have about these latter two projects is that they do not make the data that they collect publicly available, though if you were a researcher it may be possible to request it from them (I have no idea). Having all of the data also be publicly available would really push these projects over the edge from great to astonishing. But, the scientific research that is discovered is indeed shared with the public, so I don't have that strong of an opinion about it.
At the very, very least, the software running on my local machine has to be libre for it to have my respect, for privacy, security, and ethical reasons. Because the GPL and related licenses (besides the AGPL) do not require software running on a server to be shared with users, I'm not as peeved about the servers being closed source. The client, however, is really unforgivable. Millions of people are using Folding@home and doing calculations on it, and important medical discoveries are tied to its continued existence, which is all artificially limited by its proprietary nature. If you're the kind of person who is interested in Folding@home, I suggest contributing to other projects, such as some of the ones on BOINC, which are fully dedicated to improving the world's knowledge and not just the knowledge of a select few. I recommend Milkyway@home and Einstein@home; there may be others, but I haven't looked into any other projects for awhile to see.
I was almost about to recommend NumberFields@home, but after closer examination, it is not actually a libre project, just source-available. That's still a million times better than being completely closed source like Folding@home, but it's still proprietary software and not usable by third parties, and so I won't recommend contributing to the project.
June 28, 2022