This e-mail has been long delayed. As 2011 draws to a close, Open Babel is over 10 years old! At this point, it's used by over 40 open source projects, downloaded over 200,000 times, and been used in over 400 academic papers. And of course, there have been 15 releases and dozens of contributors.
Incidentally, we (finally) have an academic publication: http://www.jcheminf.com/content/3/1/33 So things have been pretty good, particularly for a project that started with cast-off code from Open Eye. Where does Open Babel go from here? Well, the good news is that open source chemistry has substantially grown up around Open Babel. There are now several open source cheminformatics toolkits, even in C++. There are plenty of desktop-level open source chemistry apps like Avogadro and PyMol. Open source chemistry drives websites like eMolecules.com, databases, and support from companies like Silicos. The not-so-good news is that to really move cheminformatics forward, some of the "guts" of OB need work. Let's be honest -- it's almost 2012, and I can't easily represent ferrocene or hydrogen bonding in many file formats. That certainly makes my teaching and research efforts difficult. For a long while, several of us, including suggestions from Greg Landrum of RDKit, Kyle Lutz of ChemKit, and others have discussed a new "core" cheminformatics library called MolCore. The code would be BSD-licensed, more liberal than the current GPL license of Open Babel. Among other advances, the design of MolCore will enable alternative bonding models beyond the standard valence bond view (e.g., delocalized electron systems, multi-center bonds, etc.), and arguably better performance, particularly at aromaticity determination. The idea is that an Open Babel v3, and other toolkits, can be built on top of MolCore. Some level of code modularity will also make it easier to integrate between multiple toolkits. The problem has been to get the ball rolling, particularly since I haven't had much time to write code myself. The good news is that pieces are falling into place, so if you're interested in helping out, please let me know. Thanks and best regards, -Geoff P.S. If you have contributed code to Open Babel and would be willing to re-license under the new BSD license, please let me know as well. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Write once. Port to many. Get the SDK and tools to simplify cross-platform app development. Create new or port existing apps to sell to consumers worldwide. Explore the Intel AppUpSM program developer opportunity. appdeveloper.intel.com/join http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-appdev _______________________________________________ OpenBabel-Devel mailing list OpenBabel-Devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openbabel-devel
