Why doesn SETI@home release the sources for the clients?
The sourcecode is not released because of both security and scientifical reasons. If the code was available freely, anyone could replace the core analyzing algorithm with some superfast random number generator, for example. http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ is a scientifical project, speed is not everything. In the newsgroups, it has been hinted that the source will be released when the project is over. There are actually small pieces of the sourcecode available. Some of the early clients were GPL’d, and you can find the sourcecode for them on the Internet. In a post to alt.sci.seti by Eric Heien, additional details of the code used was given. Parts of the post below: —-clip——————————————————- In the old versions, we used the four1 procedure for FFTs from Numerical Recipes in C. You can see the exact code and scientific and mathematical derivations for it in Numerical Recipes in C. It’s available at http://www.nr.com/, or you can just jump directly t
