Pros and Cons of Open Source Chemistry
At the recent American Chemical Society national meeting, “open access” and open source software were very much in the news — including a session of talks on the “Future of Scientific Publishing.”
As I do some software development in my free time, I’m obviously interested in hearing people’s opinion on the subject. Two recent articles were published in Drug Discovery Today focusing more on open source software in pharmaceutical research. Despite the focus on pharma, I think there are some excellent general points for other areas of scientific research.
Retention of control is a key reason to prefer open-source products… When customers develop significant reliance upon closed-source components, they can naturally expect vendors to use that leverage to squeeze them for as much revenue as they can get, just short of driving them to switch products. Unfortunate, that pattern is part of the history of drug-discovery software: consumers who developed heavy reliance upon closed-source third-party systems lacking meaningful competition have sometimes regretted their decision…
Keep in mind that proprietary vendors also tend to only support certain computing platforms. Time after time in my experience, a vendor has decided not to support some new platform, or only released binary code after a long wait. Granted, porting programs to new systems can require a significant investment in developer time. But do you want to be in the position of picking between a new, faster and more capable hardware platform and your closed-source application?
In grad school, my group was left in this position as we migrated from older SGI workstations to Sun workstations and later to Linux desktops. In each case, we were left with poor support from commercial vendors who had not yet decided to support a new platform.
The article for the “con” position came from OpenEye Scientific which previously released “OELib” as an open source product at the center of other commercial products.
By its nature, open-source development requires free exchange of ideas, community involvement, and the efforts of talented and dedicated individuals.
That quote, by the way, came from the article’s introduction. I doubt Matt will ever read this — but to me, those concepts of free exchange of ideas, community, and large amounts of effort of talented, intelligent, dedicated people, sound exactly like qualities I’d assign to scientific research.
More on that later.
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Pingback by The Blue Obelisk Movement » geoff hutchison: blog — 4 years, 4 months ago.
[...] The Blue Obelisk Movement now has an official website, mailing list, and is moving towards sharing data and algorithms. After years of mostly proprietary code, balanced with scattered code sharing among groups, open source chemistry is becoming more organized. [...]
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