All,
it is our pleasure to announce that Silicos NV, a Belgian-based
company providing services in the field of computational drug
discovery and virtual screening, has made a strategic decision to port
its own developed software under the open source domain of Open Babel
following the GNU GPL.
Porting Silicos' software under Open Babel will be done in three
steps. The first of these will involve porting our Spectrophore code.
The majority of the work on this has already been done and cross-
checked with Tim Vandemeersch; we only need to finalize a standalone
application and still have to provide some testing code. We anticipate
this to be finalized next week and therefore hope that the
Spectrophore code could be incorporated in the next major release of
OB. A final issue however concerns an granted patent (WO2009146735)
that protects the Spectrophore algorithm. We are aware that having a
patent on an algorithm which is at the same time distributed as open
source under the GNU GPL might be a difficult combination. Therefore
we have decided to not further support this patent so that in the
future their will be no issues on this anymore. However, in the
meantime and until the time the patent has expired, we would like to
guarantee potential users of the Spectrophore code that we will not
issue patent infringment claims against individuals and institutions
who use the Spectrophore software under the GNU General Public
License. We plan to do this by including a modified header in the .h
and .cpp files of the Spectrophore code. A proposal for this is given
here:
/**********************************************************************
Spectrophore.h - Spectrophore(TM) calculator.
Declarations of OBSpectrophore
Copyright (C) 2005-2010 by Silicos NV
This file is part of the Open Babel project.
For more information, see <http://openbabel.sourceforge.net/>
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation version 2 of the License.
The algorithm in this software has been covered by patent WO2009146735.
However, Silicos NV and the inventors of the above mentioned patent
assure
that no patent infringment claims will be issued against individuals or
institutions that use this software under the GNU General Public
License.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
***********************************************************************/
Of course, we would like to get feedback from you so that we are sure
that this would be sufficient. Please note that the term
'Spectrophore' has also been trademarked. However, we don't think this
should be an issue for releasing the code under open source.
In a second phase, planned for mid-summer 2010, we intent to release
our pharmacophore-based alignment tool Pharao under the OB
environment. Finally, our de-novo design tool, called Cosmos(TM), will
be release under OB somewhere near the end of the summer 2010.
The reason why we have made this strategic decision to port all our
software to the open source domain is that we, as management of
Silicos, strongly believe in an open innovation model, and open source
is just one of these factors that make open innovation possible. For
Silicos as a company, we believe that by actively participating and
supporting the OB community, we could create more business in the form
of services than we could otherwise.
Please feel free to comment.
Kind regards,
Hans De Winter
CSO Silicos NV
www.silicos.com
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