Hi Donnie, Business decisions are off-topic for the pymol-users list, but for openness and transparency I'll briefly respond.
> I always wonder, are there actually people who feel they gain some sort > of competitive advantage by having access to PyMOL features first? > Doesn't seem to make sense because anyone else can pay for the same > level of access. Plus it's mostly a visualization tool, so I'm not sure > I understand the rationale. Over the years some of our users have funded new features with the explicit understanding of exclusive limited access. So, yes, they perceive a competitive advantage. Happily, many of those features end up in the open-source. Seeing PyMOL as "mostly a visualization tool" is to see only a small fraction of its real value. > I'd always thought that the payment was intended for people who wanted > to support the future of PyMOL as well as get some high-quality > documentation and increased personal support. What you write here is the model for a canonical mainstream, open-source project--like your Gentoo Linux. Non-niche products enjoy this type of model and its concomitant success. However, molecular visualization is a small market; it's a subset of chemistry apps which is a subset of scientific apps which itself is a niche market. Were we to adopt this large-scale model, we'd have to fire all the PyMOL developers because we couldn't make enough to pay them. The market's just too small. Creating incentive for people to continue to support the project is required so we can keep open-source and commercial development moving forward We're passionate about PyMOL's continued success. If you'd like to continue this discussion, let's take it offline and you can report your results on your blog. Cheers, -- Jason -- Jason Vertrees, PhD PyMOL Product Manager Schrodinger, LLC (e) jason.vertr...@schrodinger.com (o) +1 (603) 374-7120 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d _______________________________________________ PyMOL-users mailing list (PyMOL-users@lists.sourceforge.net) Info Page: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/pymol-users Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/pymol-users@lists.sourceforge.net
