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Academic papers yanked after authors found to have used unlicensed software (go.theregister.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/58093

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[–] [email protected] 90 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

In the Register article they didn't copied from the source that the scientists were from Egypt.

Flow3D has different academic and research licenses: https://www.flow3d.com/academic-program/

There is a free research license available, but it's only for 4 months. It's short, researches can take much longer than that.
There is a free teaching license, but it can have limitations for using the software outside education. It may be forbidden to use outside classes, so it's possible that they had a teaching license, but they couldn't use that for research?
There are licenses for full departments, but it's available for selected countries only.

It's strange that they went after these scientists. In 2nd and 3rd word countries software privacy for work is still common. Everything is cheaper, but software prices are the same as in the US, so they pay relatively more for the same tool. I found that a normal license for Flow 3D can cost USD 100k. According to a quick search civil engineers get USD 2000 yearly in Egypt.

Usually American software companies don't really care about piracy by individuals in these countries. The rationale is that it's better for them if they use their software without payment instead of using a software from another vendor without payment. They go after bigger companies, at least that's my experience.

That's why this story is strange to me, or at least something else should be behind it.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago (3 children)

The rationale is that it’s better for them if they use their software without payment instead of using a software from another vendor without payment.

More importantly it is better for the company if they use their software without payment instead of developing some sort of competitor (open source or proprietary).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

They are users not developers. An academic or civil engineer who uses a CFD simulator usually has not enough programming knowledge develop such a complex application. The employer has not enough funds to pay for developers (see, they use a pirated software). Paying for developers is still more expensive than buying an already developed product.

Just look at the state of FOSS CAD software. There are some, but they are very-very limited compared to proprietary alternatives. Most people don't care, they just want to get the work done. Not everyone is a programmer, even if it looks like that from our lemmy bubble.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Don't underestimate the power of executives to make really dumb choices. My company decided we'd create our own ticketing system this year, and now my Firefox tab consumes multiple gigabytes of ram...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

You are thinking too small. Even if only one of a thousand companies in one of dozens of third world nations develops an alternative that is enough.

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