a lot of people make is sound like a bad thing that Microsoft
doesn't help the open source community much. Really? Microsoft is a
business, and while there are business models built around open
source, they OBVIOUSLY aren't as lucrative as Microsofts business
model. Mr. Gates ran Microsoft as a company should run, in the
interests of his shareholders. Microsoft exists to make money, its
what most companies do. The Gates Foundation does not exist to make
money, it exists for the purpose of philanthropy, which is equally
important. We all need money to cover our needs, and many of us need
help (especially those dying in mass numbers in third world
countries). It only exemplified to me what I knew all along, that
Mr. Gates is a man of character. (Maybe not always, a person can
read any of the numerous Gates biographies to realize that younger
Gates' character was full of holes, but thats true of most younger
people.) I am proud such a fiscally successful man has seen fit to
devote so much of his time and talent to those who really need it
the most. This is the PROPER redistribution of wealth.
A recession.
The open source movement was launched in 1998, and the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) movement came much earlier, but it was the millennial recession I call the “dot-bomb” that put it into overdrive.
That recession (it was more a depression within the industry) saw tons of code lost, and tons of people left unemployed. In the collapse of capitalist dreams came the idea of rebuilding with shared code, so that the next recession might not be so destructive.
It’s a natural reaction to a boom-and-bust cycle. Let’s rebuild and do it right.
Biology has been in perpetual boom for 20 years. Biotech assets, particularly their “intellectual property” of patents and copyrights, keep rising in value.
So while the open source ideal of sharing such assets may be more powerful in biology than in computing, the single open source start-up, Sage Bionetworks, has just now gotten off the ground. (The picture is of Sage co-founder Stephen Friend.)
It’s no accident that Sage is based in Seattle, because the idea of sharing resources in biology has an interesting godfather. You may have heard of him. Bill Gates.
Since moving from Microsoft to his Foundation, Gates has become big on sharing. Patents have a much longer history in biology than in software, but Gates made sharing discoveries a condition of his Foundation’s $287 million in grants for AIDS research in 2006.
Proprietary attitudes can slow biology even more than computing. Many discoveries are just the piece of a puzzle. If there is no sharing each owner of a piece puzzle must solve the whole puzzle himself. Thus the creation of a biology “commons” has begun gaining traction.
But individual discoveries are still seen as diamonds, not puzzle pieces. Until a recession causes this shift in understanding, open source biology will remain what open source software was before the dot-bomb, a sideline.