Like if CERN published the discovery of the Higgs boson with 99.9997% certainty, but refusing to tell you how they calculated that number, or what equipment they used and how they calibrated it, in order to prevent other labs from copying their methods.

Or like a machine learning lab claiming SOTA on a benchmark, beating a well-known method that they re-implemented, possibly with bugs, on their private dataset, for millions of compute. But you don't get the source to check, and they don't release any intermediate results or ablation experiments. Aka, from the outside you can't distinguish it from corporate marketing.

It’s research happening privately without publishing, usually going into products

Equivalent? In the analogy of the math or physics results it would be a mental model in someone's brain that you can't access or verify. You just hope it's true

I agree the post is muddy about whether the relationship is bijective (equivalent, poodle=dog) or injective (onto, poodle is a dog). I make it slightly more precise in the statement "I posit that open source software is a necessary condition if we are to science in a computerized world". That's where the "is" comes from in the title. Throughout history, this definitely has not been the case. I'm arguing that's changing.