Open source licensing has been known to be controversial here at OSNews. Simplistic characterizations (Communism, Virus, Utopia) abound which do nothing to argue the philosophy on its merits. A medical researcher notes that there is a parallel with open source development in one of our most important (and most capitalistic) industries: pharmaceutical research.
this article is weird to me.. I don’t see how you can compare ‘research’ to ‘product’ let along pharmaceutical research and open source software development… interesting article nonetheless.
“…investment in funding from one or all of these countries.”
Actually Japan alone is investing $8.9 Billion(USD) for R&D as part of their collaberation with S.Korea and China on a standard linux distro.
Well, this is true. Drug companies have to actually produce the drugs, and there’s quite a big more effort involved in producing drugs from the research than there is from producing software from code.
I guess the problem essentially revolves around the fact that in essence, code _is_ software. Of course, if everyone used open file formats, the whole point would in a lot of cases be moot… or would it? On a simplistic ultra-paranoid level, if the software used to produce say, a textual document of some kind isn’t open, how do you know that word processor didn’t have some back door that changed what the author thought he wrote when he saved to disk?
Of course, when it comes to pharmaceuticals, this isn’t being paranoid, because it’s going into your body, to deliberatly make changes, and it’s possible, even when everyone has the best intentions to end up with problomatic drugs due to contamination.
The point the author is trying to make is that a highly commerical and successful industry essentially runs on ‘Open Source’. I am not yet convinced it really translates to the software industry though (although I fully support F/OSS for other reasons).
still makes no sense and your response makes further no sense to me, i guess if i fully supported the movement id try to understand further.
then again, I do support the non-gpl open source movement simply because its harder for me to sell inexpensive software to make a living when there are other free alternatives that dont require support contracts..
but, copying code to a cd or putting it on the internet or hard disc is very different to me than doing open research and collaboration for drugs since not everybody has the corporate power to market, brand, and distribute drugs.. oppose to software.. I guess that’s pretty much the only thing that keeps me from not understanding this article
(1) “Anyone” can compile and redistribute an OSS program, if they have the source code and the proper compilers — which is usually the case. By comparison, only a miniscule number of people possesses the resources to produce a pharmaceutical drug, even when they have its chemical formula (or, for that matter, the method used to produce it).
(2) EVEN IF most people could acquire the resources to produce their own drugs, pharmaceutical companies receive protection from patents. Patents reward the company’s investment by granting the company a monopoly for a set number of years, so they can charge a high price and make a rather fat profits off the new drug. When the patent expires, the company then has to compete with others who can now sell the drug — and so they reduce the price. Depending on whose line of reasoning you take in the OSS camp, patents are anathema to software.
So, I don’t think the drug industry is at all a model for OSS.
It seems that you are against GPL, and open source in general. Or at least as long as they can’t be used to replace a proprietary software. Then how come you base your company on GPL and other open source software? (If your nick is any indication of who you are, that is.) Just curious, that’s all.
Of course, if everyone used open file formats, the whole point would in a lot of cases be moot… or would it?
Not necessarily. If one developer had a secret tenchnique to do some word processing task faster, or had a well-designed interface that enhanced productivity — even though a competitor could handle the same file formats and sell their software at a lower price, many consumers (by no means all) would choose the superior software, even if it came at some price premium.
FOR EXAMPLE: That’s why some of us buy Apples — we think we get more bang for our buck. An Apple traverses the same world-wide web, reads the same email, and reads the same Microsoft Office formats. Some people perceive “price premium” and stay away from Apple; a minority perceive “higher quality” and buy it.
I agree that because compiling is so cheap, any company that discloses its full source code runs the risk of having their design copied and recoded. Copyrights work, but only on software so large that it is too costly to redo. Accordingly, most open source products that want to make money actually selling their product, not just services, probably won’t.
I think Windows is a good candidate for open source, at least in countries that respect intellectual property, because it would take 1000’s of programmers each writing hundreds of lines of code a day, over a decade to produce something that was a complete substitute. Even though a lot of things like 3rd party drivers could be reused.
Well, you actually kind of just upheld to my (badly phrased) point.
You buy Apple because it’s a better computer. However, because email, webpages, text documents, mp3s, etc etc are open file formats, I’m free to use another OS (be it Linux, BSD, BeOS, AmigaOS, SkyOS or even Windows), and we can freely exchange data, even if all the operating systems were 100% closed.
(The above is why on a personal level, I’m not a GPL fanatic, but am an open standards fanatic)
MP3 may be “open”, but not “free”. Remember, due to patent issues, there cannot exist a free MP3 encoder. Same for GIF.
Have any of you lot even heard of generics? this would be the OSS equivalentin pharmaceutical.
Because most of you are nice and healthy it has not come accross to you the fact the thousands of people die every day becouse of gready companies (ie. phyfer, roche, etc) that like to keep a nice monopoly on the drugs produced.
When the good guys (read generics) start mass producing drugs, it kinda hurts these wonderfull examples of capitalism and they send in the big dogs (goverment) to try to destroy them.
<tin hat> remember when the US was chasing the taliban and a missle hit an installation the yanks said was a missle complex? guess what it was the biggest generics plant for the middle east</tin hat>
My company? Against Open Source? We all have strange days my friend. I’m not against the open source movement. My idea is that they both must live together. Since software jobs are all going overseas to build alot of the useful software open source won’t really hurt the programmers job here.. I’m not against open source. HawkinsOS and Rack64.com both use Open source systems. Sometimes when I pay alot of money to get something programmed and customers choose a GPL’d program over mind I get angry and rant on about how evil that is but I truly think the GPL is good for somethings, like software that would not live without being free and never closed. I love to voice concern over GPL and alot of companies will not say they don’t like it to please linux users, like redhat, but I don’t like to do that. HawkinsOS is based on FreeBSD, Rack64.com is based on Linux. Yes, I indirectly support the GPL.. And that is because I paid for some licenses that run on linux upfront and I havent had the time to migrate thousands of customers over to freebsd so I can cut costs on server hardware… Rack64.com will continue to use “Popular” operating systems like Linux, Solaris, Windows, FreeBSD,etc. While this is not the foundation you must bend like the grass to stay afloat even if you don’t like something. Must eat you know.. aside from that nothing that i do is based on the GPL. Open source maybe, but not the GPL. You will see all the stuff I am going to release is under the BSD.
You got at least one more here who share a lot of your opinions.
GPL and open source is not same thing, when will Linux fanatics realise this?
I support BSDL but not GPL… in fact I find it cool that most Linux users actually switched due to software available which is NOT GPL… such as Apache, X, Postgree, Mozilla, OOo… there’s plenty more. Funny thing is that most of the non GPLd software offer something different from the proprietary equivalent while most GPL stuff simply don’t and offer a simple clone.
That doesn’t really have anything to do with licensing but it’s a strange reality…. so maybe it has to do something with the licensing and the minds of those who choose a certain license.
Mozilla and OpenOffice.org *is* licensed under GPL. Not *only* GPL, but they are dual or triple licensed, and GPL is one of them.
Check your facts.
The analogy of generics to open-source software is quite a good one. But it’s over-simplistic to dismiss the ‘big pharma’ companies who produce the drugs initially as greedy. It costs huge amounts of money to discover, develop and test a new drug, money which the generic manufacturer doesn’t have to spend. The deeper question is how should this development be funded ideally. Currently it is largely by market-driven forces — pharma companies invest in products they think will sell well. The alternative would be to ‘nationalise’ the whole industry so that it works entirely like the academic research described in the article; all funding ($100s millions per drug on average) comes up-front from the government/health insurers, and all research is published immediately, and anyone is free to make and sell the molecules which are produced.
Which approach would be more efficient is much like asking whether open or closed source software is more efficient.
As an aside, the company I work for produces sotware for a number of large pharmaceutical companies. While the research may be open, certain details are kept very closed. For instance, when one company sent us a screenshot of some software in use, they blanked out an area showing a chemical structure diagram as it was considered too sensitive to risk leaving the company.
The comparison to OSS breaks down at this point, as OSS is far more open about all the details.
But to satisfy the commies they offer a GPL solution since just recently…
Or, it could be the fact that they wish to protect the source code for the future. Why is it every disucssion about the GPL here degrades into a vocal minority calling the GPL supporters communists ( don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone call the BSD lic supporters Anachists, which would be analogus)? I don’t know where you got your education, but I see nothing in the GPL that says the State must own all GPL software (which would be a very communist licence). Quit trolling, bub.
Have any of you lot even heard of generics?
The real question is, Did you even bother to read my comment before making yours? I specifically mentioned generics, as well as situation you described, minus the rhetoric of greed.
The analogy breaks down quickly. You cannot replicate endless identical copies of a pharmaceutical on your home PC, as you can replicate software. You can’t easily modify the drugs you buy to make your own varient (even if that were legal) as you can with software. The product here is a physical item, a drug which is sold to make money. That a drug may be developed using on freely available scientific research does not affect a company’s ability to patent the resulting product and sell it under a protected monopoly for several years (patents being generally a good thing, imho). Once the patent expires, it is still non-trivial to replicate the drug for sale as a generic, or modify it to obtain new effect.
Im glad someone else has pointed this out.
I have been saying this for time. The two go hand (propriatory firms and pharmaceutical companies) in hand except that open source is much more than just “generic”
also note that the melinda and gates foundation seems to do a lot of supporting of the pharmaceutical industry..
As a serious question, how would you apply the open source software development paradigm to drug design? The pharma industry would break down without patents, because no-one would be able to afford to produce new drugs without the enhanced revenue from the ‘monopoly’ period (and it’s not a true monopoly, as there are always many competing drugs on the market for each disease). Maybe there is a better system, which is why the analogy (though not perfect) is interesting.
Yes, but the cost of manufacturing and distributing a drug, starting from a known molecule which has been tested and licensed, is much the same for everbody in the market. So the question is, how should the initial development be funded? Allowing the initial developer to charge a premium on the product, like proprietary software houses, or some other method?
MP3 may be “open”, but not “free”. Remember, due to patent issues, there cannot exist a free MP3 encoder. Same for GIF.
GIF was never (to my knowledge) patented. The compression algorithm which GIF is using, LZH, was patented but expired in the US last year and expires worldwide this year.
Had software AND drugs! What’s not to like?
You are very right! (The Mozilla thing is more recent I believe). I don’t have a problem with dual and trilicense policies as you can still close the source under the other ones. I think it is to appease GPL developers
“MP3 may be “open”, but not “free”. Remember, due to patent issues, there cannot exist a free MP3 encoder. Same for GIF.
GIF was never (to my knowledge) patented. The compression algorithm which GIF is using, LZH, was patented but expired in the US last year and expires worldwide this year.”
MP3 patent doesn’t apply in Europe, only in the USA. Since it is a software patent. This is believed to be the reason RedHat doesn’t ship MP3 players, and also believed to be the reason why RedHat doesn’t shop NTFS-related code.
Maybe you are right to say it applies on more countries than the USA only when you include MP3 players as “hardware devices” (though those still run software). I don’t know.
I think that with how previous posters have showed about the pharma industry it is partly open-source partly closed-source. Reminds me about Helixplayer. Everything open-source, except the most interesting part for which you’d run the whole damn thing: the Real codecs. Free, and free, with an additional non-Free (sometimes non-free) drawback.
“You are very right! (The Mozilla thing is more recent I believe). I don’t have a problem with dual and trilicense policies as you can still close the source under the other ones. I think it is to appease GPL developers
”
you have no idea. its for remaining compatible which is very important
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html