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``What if the U.S. government built a highway with taxpayers' money but only let the richest drivers use it? That's what federal agencies are doing with publicly funded software, say a growing number of scientists and programmers. The losers, they claim, are startup companies.
``The issue is heating up especially in the field of bioinformatics, which is supported largely by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Researchers use bioinformatics software to speed biology research, including analyses of gene sequences. Now that the human genome has been sequenced and the world's supply of genomic data is growing, sales of desktop bioinformatics programs in the United States will rise from $390 million this year to $2.2 billion in 2007, predicts the research firm Frost & Sullivan.
[...]
``The situation has some software developers bent out of shape, including Jason Stewart, a yoga-practicing independent consultant in Albuquerque, New Mexico. `Publicly funded software, like publicly funded roads, should be public,' he says. In September, Mr. Stewart and fellow consultants Harry Mangalam and Jiaye Zhou posted an online petition. The document, which has attracted 700 signatures to date, reads like a manifesto of the public-software movement: `We believe that researchers supported by publicly funded grant agencies should be required, as a condition of funding, to publish any source code under an Open Source or a Free Software license.' Open-source and free-software licenses let anyone modify a program's source code, the underlying instructions that make a program run. Under such agreements, people can redistribute a program for free or for profit, and when they pass on the code as part of a software release, they don't have to pay royalties.''
Open Informatics Petition:
http://www.openinformatics.org
Full story:
http://www.redherring.com/insider/2002/0225/1805.html
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Discussion forums: Red Herring: Should Publicly Funded Software Be Free?
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