Award-winning researchers 'did not steal my code', says Canadian software engineer
Canadian author of open-sourced software says project team's use was not an act of plagiarism
The winner of China's top science award and his team were not "thieves", according to the author of the open-source software whose codes were used in one of the scientists' projects.
"I wouldn't call their use of my project plagiarism because my licence permits the use of the source code under certain conditions," Iordan Iordanov, a software engineer based in Toronto, Canada, told the Sunday Post on Wednesday.
His remarks follow accusations made about a research project on "transparent computing" by Professor Zhang Yaoxue and his team at Tsinghua University in Beijing and Central South University in Changsha, Hunan. The project earned Zhang China's top national science award last month.
But ever since the award was announced, doubts and criticism of the project have flooded in. Many criticised the government for allowing what they regarded as political interference in the award evaluation process. Others said Zhang's work was not groundbreaking and had received little recognition by his international peers. In addition to being president of the China Central University, Zhang is also an academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a former official at the Ministry of Education.
Though the accusations of plagiarism were not directly related to criticisms about whether Zhang should have been given the top science award, they have only added to the controversy.
Zhang's transparent computing theory aimed to reduce or even eliminate the need to install computer operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Google Android or Apple iOS on personal computers and mobile devices using high speed internet connections.
In defence of their project, Zhang and his team released a video demonstrating their work. The film shows a series of "transparent devices" that perform many tasks without an operating system installed locally.