Re: [ox-en] Re: Next successful Free Product?
- From: Jason Bechtel <jasonmbechtel gmail.com>
- Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 18:07:03 -0500
[Hi. My first post since rejoining the list a little while ago... I
was on the list briefly several years ago. Sorry to read of all the
departures... Glad to see some people are still here.]
Along the lines of Free Science, I think the case is strongest in the
areas where software is most entrenched. I happen to have just been
accepted into a Masters program in Bioinformatics, Proteomics and
Genomics. This field is ripe for the message of Free Software. In
fact, much has already been done. As I wrote in my personal statement
as part of my application to the program:
A movement in this direction has already been underway for several
years. For example, on January 1, 2000, Dr. Steven E. Brenner
accepted a research post developing bioinformatics software at UC
Berkeley on the condition that he have the freedom to freely
distribute his work. Since its inception, the European Bioinformatics
Institute has been responsible for promoting open source
bioinformatics. The NIH's public Human Genome Project and the SNP
Consortium's public-private Hap Map project are examples of
collaborations that extend around the globe. Perhaps most
demonstrative of all, open source languages, libraries and tools, such
as BioPerl, hidden Markov model libraries, the NCBI toolkit and
EMBOSS, are now at the heart of mainstream bioinformatics. And there
are now serious efforts underway to find treatments for tropical
diseases like dengue and malaria using open source bioinformatics in
an international collaborative environment....
Science abhors secrecy. We see what happens when pharmaceutical
companies get to pick and choose the studies they want to pay
attention to and which to ignore... When the science is embodied to a
great extent in software, at it often is with drug discovery and
modeling, and where much of that research is paid for by the NIH and
NSF (thus, public tax dollars) there is an excellent case to be made
for all of that code being at least open, if not Free.
Jason
On 12/10/05, Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de> wrote:
Hi list!
Just a few quick thoughts.
2 months (66 days) ago Stefan Merten wrote:
I had an additional idea on this catalog of questions. What about
asking for existing "next successful Free Products" these questions?
Currently two next successful Free Products come to mind: Wikipedia
and Free Science (often labeled Open Access). I think nobody here
would refuse that Wikipedia is a big success and it is as Free as Free
Software. Free Science IMHO is not yet a success Free Product but
there are a lot of promising aspects in the movement.
May be blogs are in a way also in this category. They seem to be
something like Free Journalism.
So far I thought of Indymedia as a Free Journalism project, but blogs
in many ways remind me more of Free Software than Indymedia. May be
even the (so-called) cathedral-bazaar distinction brought up by Eric
S. Raymond in one of his early papers applies here.
Anyway - my knowledge about blogs and the blogosphere is very limited.
May be someone else here is more knowledgeable than me and can give
his/her impression?
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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