Slashdot Mirror
On Research Institutions and Corporate Interests
The following is an Editorial which appeared in the Jan. 20 issue of Nature Journal. Reprinted here with permission:
In Praise of Open Source Software"Imagine how the Web might look today had it been invented by Microsoft and made proprietary, rather than at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), where it was made available free. Scientists tinkering with computers to create tools for their research for no profit have underpinned the computer revolution. The bounds of supercomputing are being pushed back by hugely demanding challenges, such as protein folding and the cosmos; many of the pioneers of the Internet are not Internet millionaires, but are still labouring in their laboratories.
The profit motive, and the investments that go with it, are often essential. The scrappy, early 'Mosaic' browser designed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois only took off when some of the scientists who invented it went on to set up Netscape. But the abuse of commercial monopolies is also too evident, with much of the world having been held hostage to the dismal operating system DOS for more than a decade.
This issue -- providing equitable access to all scientists and not just the richest -- is about to become critical as companies rush to build bioinformatic tools for genomics. Tools that add value to genome data are to be welcomed, but as the licensing strategy being adopted by Celera Genomics becomes clear, it gives new grounds for wariness. Unfortunately, restrictive material-transfer agreements are also becoming the rule even in publicly funded institutions. While academic research centres are an important cradle for industrial development, it is crucial that the not-for-profit motive should be respected when the needs of research communities are best served in this way.
The high cost of some journals has attracted enormous attention over the past few years, whereas the high cost of software and the often exorbitant licence charges have not. Most scientific software is proprietary, and beyond the reach of many poorer parts of the scientific community worldwide. All the more reason to be grateful, therefore, for the continuation of the open spirit in the tradition of Internet pioneers. Witness the group of Californian scientists developing sophisticated 'freeware' for DNA chip technology. The software, which users say compares favourably with costly commercial software, can be downloaded from the Web. Another example: scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Potsdam have made freely available a vast suite of plug-and-play tools, 'Cactus', that allows scientists from any discipline to use supercomputers without needing to know advanced computing techniques. A Japanese scientist is giving away E-Cell, a package that simulates basic cell processes. And so on.
The open-source movement has found its apogee in the Linux operating system developed by Linus Benedict Torvalds (see http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/~torvalds) as a 'hobby' -- which IBM last week decided to put at the core of its hardware plans. Because the code is not proprietary, it is being built on and debugged by an army of amateur developers worldwide, many of them academic scientists.
In short, amateur software developers are playing a key role in keeping systems open. But such activities need to be encouraged and professionalized by academic institutions; plans in France to create a research centre to provide bioinformatic tools for industrial and academic researchers build on the tradition of the Centre d'Etude du Polymorphisme Humain, the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information and the European Bioinformatics Institute. At a time when Microsoft looks as if it may be broken up (shades of AT&T) into 'Baby Bills', it would be ironic if science, and biology in particular, became a victim of new monopolies.
Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2000 Registered No. 785998 England.
with much of the world having been held hostage to the dismal operating system DOS for more than a
decade.
DOS = Dismal Operating System *LMFAO* I love it....any bets on that being done intentionally?
Sgt Pepper
Lame Sig Shamelessly Ripped from
Fortune:
A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn.
Fund academia. It is that simple.
Intellectual property did not become a major issue until the first half of this century. It is not an accident that this coincident with the first shift of brainpower out of traditional academia and into for-profit corporations. Intellectual property did not become a top-priority issue until the past 2 decades, which coincided with a much greater shift of the same nature, due to the blooming of computer technology. For centuries before all this, science was concentrated in academia, where people pursued knowledge for the sake of knowledge, not for the sake of profit. The modern capitalist state discourages that to a large extent. While I don't advocate communism per se, it may be worthwhile to note that a disproportionate part of advances in science made in this century came from communist nations, where science did not have to depend on, or be subservient to, corporate interests. This goes for science in general just as well for any subset thereof.
I am not asking for a revolution. If there's one thing this century has taught us, it is that those are largely pointless. And that a free-market society is the best we have. What I ask for is that the free-market philosophy be limited when it comes to pursuit of knowledge. As long as universities prosper, we will see good research, which doesn't get hogged by some corporation, and which remains in the public domain for the good of mankind. If current trends continue, we'll see increasing brain drains, such as Microsoft's infamous raid on Carnegie Mellon's OS faculty (for those of you who haven't heard, they came, offered huge salaries, and basically left the CMU CS dept without any OS specialists), which will transfer brain power in the hands of those who cannot use it ethically simply because their primary goal is profit.
Unfortunately, academia requires a huge investment to maintain, since it does not naturally flourish under market forces; it is that investment that is needed to keep "intellectual property" out of the hands of those who want to "own" it. And it is that investment that needs to be made continually for research as we know it to survive.
// zyqqh
What can we do to keep people in research? Make them feel worthwhile and deserved. Compensate them fairly with respect to their peers in private industry. If it can't be cash, improve their working environment or just plain treat them better. Understand the sacrifices we make to do what we love, and try and make it so we don't regret choosing to work in research.
The reason research institutions have traditionally felt free to give their tools, results and expertise away is because they were mostly publicly funded. No one (okay, almost no one) ever got rich doing science - it was a bit like the old Marxist cliché from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Once money is out of the picture, prestige becomes the measure of success, in part for the reasons so frequently outlined by Eric Raymond, but also because the only people in science who do get rich are high-prestige scientists who get book contracts, do the lecture circuit, and for the really lucky, get bit parts in TV shows like the Simpsons and Star Trek.
From that perspective, giving it all away makes a great deal of sense.
Now, governments are pushing universities and other research institutions to seek private funding and cut deals with profit-seeking companies for whom prestige is inevitably secondary to the bottom line. With the advent of the "dot-com" boom, researchers in biotech and anything related to computing or cognitive science have the potential to make a fortune quickly by keeping their knowledge secret; and as long as they cut their bosses in for even a small piece of the action, most universities and research institutes are glad to let them.
The traditional culture of science and research is breaking down, and without a return to substantially publicly funded research, open source ideas will stop coming out of those places. This has an impact far beyond mere software. Science can't function in secret and in the long run there is a real risk that the technological revolution of the past 300 years will slow down or come to an end.
I know that open source as a movement relies on all sorts of volunteers. It's likely that Linux and the GNU packages we've come to know and love can survive without a flow of new ideas from researchers, but there will be a lot of suffering without them.
The number of people who died under Stalin's rule has absolutely no relevance to public funding of universities. If you want to argue for the superiority of private funding, go ahead, but don't pull out this red herring of equating anything that could be described as "socialized" with Stalinist oligarchy. You may not like Canada's socialized medical insurance system (it is not "socialized medicine," as doctors are still more often than not in private practice), but it has demonstrably not led to widespread famine and forced labor camps. And, in practice, only the purest of libertarians complains about the government structures that help business in the United states, from sugar subsidies to below-market logging in national forests, from local "incentives" to companies and sports teams to the S&L bailout.
I know it's heretical to suggest in this day and age that public institutions, sometimes even in the form of (gasp) Big Government, can actually do some things better than companies can, but sometimes that's hard to dispute--you can go back to the railroads, and a little more recently to the analog phone system. These were public-private partnerships because there is little economic justification for companies to pursue plans that will not pay off for a decade (or more).
If innovation is effectively privatized, there wouldn't be things like the World Wide Web. And Monsanto was a much more chilling example to have picked than I suspect you intended. Perhaps the idea of companies patenting crops that indigenous farmers have been planting for thousands of years and then charging the farmers to keep planting those crops doesn't bother you. Maybe the idea of your own genes being patented by a company--giving them control over not only research but applications (like disease treatments) involving the genes they "own"--doesn't bother you, either. It bothers me, though. It bothers me a lot.