[Fsf-friends] Open Source goes beyond software (S Sadagopan)

[Frederick Noronha (FN)]

http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=89284

Open Source goes beyond software

Free digital archives being extended from health to all biological sciences

S SADAGOPAN  Posted online: Friday, April 29, 2005 at 0000 hours IST
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S Sadagopan

What began as the 'free software' movement, thanks to Richard Stallings, has 
matured over the years. It is not just a posturing alternative to the 
commercial 'closed' software. Software and services are a dominant sector of 
economic activity. Major industry segments -- automobiles, banking & finance, 
healthcare, oil & gas, retail and transportation -- depend heavily on software. 
And so, interest in the open source movement has heightened. The combination of 
the Linux operating system (widely used at the server level and with increasing 
adoption at the desktop), Apache (powering half the world's web servers), mySQL 
(the database that has come of age) and Perl (the widely used scripting 
language) --- together generally referred to as Lamp -- has an eco-system of 
pundits, developers, evangelists and adopters that cut across geographies, 
industries, languages and cultures. Somewhere, it has struck an interesting 
chord in the minds of millions of people.

What is interesting is that the open source philosophy has deeply influenced 
many other segments of human endeavour. I will touch upon scientific publishing 
as one such segment in this column. For long, scientific publishing was 
controlled by the scientific societies. With technology starting to dominate 
industry and 'licensing' contributing a significant part of the revenue of 
technology companies, scientific publishing went into the hands of commercial 
companies. Authors had to 'pay' a fee to get their papers published; the 
journals' subscription rates started rocketing.

The nexus between libraries and publishing houses could partly alleviate the 
problem; individuals were given 'subsidised' subscription. There are some 
bright spots. Societies such as IEEE in the US and IEE in Britain do have 
clout: they are still in the hands of professionals. But such success is not 
widely prevalent. Responding to this, an Open Source publishing movement 
started some time ago. In the early Internet days, there was even talk of 'self 
publishing,' where you create a website and keep all the written stuff, for 
access to any intended reader. With the growth of 'web spiders' and search 
engines, such as Google, there was even a feeling that publishers would be 
"driven away." Luckily, no such thing happened.

. After free digital archives have come individual internet weblogs
. The Open Source philosophy is invading one territory after another
One clear example of an alternative to 'commercial publishing' is the PubMed 
Central (http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/index.html) project of the US National 
Institute of Health (NIH). It is a free digital archive of citations and 
scholarly journals. It is not a replacement for publishing, but provides an 
alternative open and free resource for all humanity. The same group also 
provided GenBank, the highly successful genetic data sequence repository, that 
allowed researchers anywhere in the world to tap into the huge database of 
human genomic sequences. Even more interesting is the arrival of the blog 
(internet weblog), that is permitting thousands of individuals to 
'self-publish.' Blog became the most used word in the year 2004, as per 
Webster's online dictionary (see my FE column of Feb 4).

Google, MSN, Sify and Rediff provide space and tools for bloggers today. But 
what really excites me is the Cambia (Italian word for change) Project, that is 
building an alternative, BIOS (Biological Innovation for Open Society). Bios is 
extending the Open Source software movement to biological sciences (including 
agriculture and pharmaceuticals). Their Bio-forge (www.bioforge.net), on the 
lines of the highly successful repository, Source-forge 
(http://sourceforge.net/), of Open Source projects (code, code samples, white 
papers, FAQ, tutorials and guides, with 99,483 live projects and 1,062,251 
registered users as on April 28) is another idea whose time has come. Bio-forge 
also has an excellent free, full-text access to some key parts of patents' 
information. I find them to be the best among all online patent tutorials, 
database, white papers, etc). It will be interesting to watch this Open Source 
movement over the next decade, as it invades many other territories of human 
endeavor.

The writer is director, IIIT, Bangalore. These are his personal views

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