The Unidata Policy Committee during its April 2010 meeting raised an issue about significant use of Unidata services and software without much acknowledgment. Symptoms include
One concrete example of the latter symptom is the NOAA GEO-IDE data access site, which shows data access tools available for use in the NOAA Global Earth Observation Integrated Data Environment (GEO-IDE) in conjunction with the new Unified Access Framework for Gridded Data (UAF Grid). The site prominently displays and describes several Unidata products:
However, a search for the text string "unidata" on that site will come up empty. Careful scrutiny reveals a small Unidata logo along with five other logos in a NASCAR-style "Interoperability" box at the top right. "Unidata" also appears in the IDV logo, but text represented as pixels in a logo is not indexed for searches. Hence it is difficult to determine from the text on that web page the involvement of Unidata in directly creating the software or in developing and maintaining the infrastructure on which the other software depends. Without Unidata, much of the software on that page either would not exist or the data that makes the software useful would not be in an accessible form.
Another example is the McIDAS-V homepage, which provides information about the next generation open-source McIDAS visualization and analysis software, primarily based on Unidata's IDV software (which in turn is based on SSEC's VisAD software). There is no mention of Unidata or IDV in the text on the home page and no Unidata logo. If you click on the "About" link, there is no mention of Unidata, but "IDV" is mentioned twice.
These examples are not intended to criticize NOAA's GEO-IDE UAF project, the McIDAS-V project, or the developers of those very useful web sites, but rather to provide typical examples of the context in which Unidata's software is appearing without explicit, indexable exposure of the organization. NOAA's GEO-IDE UAF and SSEC's McIDAS-V are also trying to establish their own branding for greater recognition and exposure. Examples of sites that do include acknowledgment of Unidata are not hard to find.
Is lack of exposure or branding of Unidata really a problem? Is wanting Unidata mentioned every time one of its software products or services is cited asking too much? This might be analogous to the organization that developed Java wanting credit whenever software written in Java is mentioned. It should be noted that although Unidata makes use of Java libraries in all its Java software, such as THREDDS, netCDF-Java, and the IDV, it's very difficult to find an explicit mention of Sun or Oracle (who now has the rights to the Java trademark) on the Unidata web site. Similarly, although the C language is widely used, there is rarely any associated mention of the organization that developed C.
It could be argued that organizations and developers who have chosen to create widely useful open-source software have implicitly also chosen utility as a higher priority than credit. This is especially true for middleware, such as TDS and netCDF, because the users of products that make use of such infrastructure are typically only aware of its existence when it stops functioning as intended.
On the other hand, it seems reasonable that NSF, the sponsoring organization that has provided the funding and support for Unidata to develop widely used software and services, deserves credit and recognition for their sponsorship. Ultimately people should be able to determine the value of funding NSF, if spin-offs from that funding result in leveraging the value of research and development for use not only in education and research, but also in the infrastructure used by other developers in products like McIDAS-V and NOAA's GEO-IDE, and in commercial products such as ESRI ArcInfo, MATLAB, and IDL. Crediting Unidata provides a way to determine where the funding came from for development of products that depend on Unidata's efforts.
But how practical is requiring citation of Unidata? According to Google, there are 3,000,000 web sites that mention netCDF. It is hard to argue that the gargantuan project of getting those web sites to cite Unidata is a worthwhile use of resources.
Even if it were practical, how effective would it be to require that Unidata's name be part of the name of Unidata software, such as "Unidata THREDDS" or "Unidata netCDF", so that users of the software could at least trace its ultimate funding to NSF? Unfortunately, it turns out that the mere mention of "Unidata" doesn't uniquely identify the NSF-funded program. According to Google, there are currently about 10 million web sites that mention "Unidata", but only about 16% of those refer to UCAR's Unidata. The rest refer to various other commercial entities, products, and projects that also use a "Unidata" name. Because UCAR's Unidata has no trademark rights to the name, the issue of branding Unidata software and services with the "Unidata" name is less compelling.
How practical would it be to just require acknowledgment of UCAR Unidata in future papers, web sites, and software that depend on NSF-funded Unidata efforts? It turns out that such a requirement in a software license disqualifies that license from being labeled "Open Source", according to current definitions of that term by both the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation. Such a restriction was included in the original Berkeley Software Distribution license but was later removed, primarily because it becomes impractical to acknowledge every contributing organization in aggregate works, and because it adds restrictions beyond those already imposed by accepted open source licenses. For more on this issue, see the discussion in the Wikipedia article on the BSD license.
We recommend that Unidata request but not require acknowledgement of both UCAR Unidata and NSF (or other funding source as appropriate) in mention of Unidata products and services. No stronger action is recommended at this time.
We also recommend changes Unidata can implement to web pages, documentation, and other communications to better convey the development and continued support of Unidata software and services.
Some examples of such changes include: