[Biodevelopers] question on the business side of development

[Joe Landman]

Hi Ognen: 

  I wasn't questioning whether or not having source is a good thing.  I
generally believe it is a good thing. 

  The questions I am raising are subtle, and may be lost in the
language.  You raised one of my questions as a point, so I will try to
be a bit more clear. 

First, I am wondering if people building their own tools to do their
work or research are preferring open source (in the GPL sense) to
commercial tools. 

Second, if the open source route is preferred, then is it because of the
free as in libre or free as in beer reason. 

Third, if you prefer using commercial tools, may I ask why, and what
tools.  I am trying to get a sense for what those people who build the
tools at end user or research sites prefer (unscientific, self selective
poll that may still yield qualatative features I am interested in
learning more about). 

What I am really getting after is whether or not there are real
possibilities for building a business out of providing software and
service for informatics computing.  It seems to me that there are many
business models that simply do not work here (ASP is a great example). 
I am wondering if being an independent bioinformatics software vendor is
a workable scenario.

Another way to put the question is, where is the value that a company or
a group would be willing to pay for.  Is it in the software side?  The
services?  The implementation?  The management?  Where is the value, and
are people willing to pay for it.

This is a necessary question to ask if you are attempting to go to
market with a product, or write a business plan, etc.

Note:  I think things like Bioperl, Ensembl, DAS, are excellent bits of
work.  They are tools to accomplish a particular set of analysis.  Since
they are available free (as in beer and as in Libre), offering a
competing service which is neither (free nor libre) may be a poor
business model.  But working with them, and using them to build tools,
or augmenting them might be interesting.

I am hoping that people in industry and academe would comment with their
thoughts on these issues, or raise some of their own.  I think Chris
Dagdigian and others would have opinions (as the neutral consultants).


Joe


On Thu, 2002-05-23 at 01:23, Ognen Duzlevski wrote: 

> If I never had the clustalw source available I would have never made its
> multithreaded version available for free either. I am no researcher in
> the field but to me as a programmer these tools are that - tools, and
> they should be there at no cost so that people can focus on the real
> stuff - figuring out what that little piece of information means and
> does.
-- 
Joe Landman,
email: landman at scientificappliance.com
web  : http://scientificappliance.com