On Mar 27, 2019, at 13:26, Chris Swain via Rdkit-discuss <rdkit-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > This is an interesting discussion and suspect this does not only apply to > open-source software developers, there are similar challenges for small > independent software companies.
My points were focused on the disadvantages of a pure open source software development strategy with respect to proprietary software development. There are, of course, many other problems which are shared between small independent software vendors of both free and proprietary software. On the other hand, there are also many existing resources on developing commercial propriety software as a small ISV. > On CICAG (http://www.rsccicag.org) we have been discussing the possibility of > organising a (probably one day) meeting around the topic of open > data/software/publishing and sustainability. At this point I cannot recommend that any ISV consider an open source product as a viable strategy, not even for marketing purposes as name recognition for future consulting work. My current belief is that people hire a consultant to solve problems. They hear from talks or from other people that person X can help solve problems, and hire X. If person X writes tool Y to solve certain problems, and sells that as a proprietary product, then people will contact X in order to purchase it to solve their problem. If tool Y is distributed as open source, then they don't really have a problem, because they can solve their problem themselves by installing a package, and it works. That only takes a few minutes. They may not even know who X is. This is especially true if it's distributed through the usual channels like (Bio)conda, PyPI, and DebianScience. As I've pointed out before, I've seen innumerable posters where the poster author thanks a commercial vendor for a no-cost academic license for a product, but does not thank the authors of the free software packages also used. Which is perfectly acceptable under the respective licenses, but I think also an indicator that people feel more obligation for someone who actively helps solves their problems than for something like "pip install Y". Regards, Andrew da...@dalkescientific.com _______________________________________________ Rdkit-discuss mailing list Rdkit-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rdkit-discuss
