GPL is most deftly NOT Public domain. GPL restrictions inplace to prevent it from bing public domain, but allowing publiv access to it.
The “contrdiction” comes from Crunch3r violating GPL by not keeping the source for 3 years. and from no-one requesting a copy of the source so that that could be a single point loss.
The Restriction is there to prevent Propitory Application from using the public code and then not continuing to share the public code aspects. it would give grounds to sue on the basis of copyright infringment.
Ever since this nonsense with the seti application I have adopted, and so far adhered to, a strict policy of downloading the sources of any purportedly-open-source application that I wish to install. I very often did so anyway and regret very much that I did not bother to email the author straight away in this case. As I have already done with paint.NET in this thread, I will confirm that I have downloaded the sources when recommending any such software.
The Einstein@home team are asking contributors please to revert to the standard S5 application instead of using any of the patches. To judge by the current activity on the E@H forum this is very much breaking news and there is so far no formal statement on their home page. The best statement I can find at present comes from Akos (lightly edited by myself):
“… the Einstein@Home staff need scientifically reliable results. Unofficial apps can’t meet this requirement, because these applications have not been accepted [validated, refereed] by the various different scientific groups.”
This seems to be a formal issue, but with millions of dollars and Euros of public funding, very expensive toys and the life work of many scientists involved, it is essential to do things properly.
The standard S5 application already has many of Akos’ S4 optimisations and I would hope that once the dust settles the team can work out a disciplined way of making further progress.
I don’t think there is one. I think there are very few projects with optimized clients, and I suspect those are the projects where there is only a few variations (or no variations) of the client. I’ve not heard of an optimized client for a biological project.
Not that I’m aware of, but I tend to stick to the standard one. Anyone else?