Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
existing methods further in a given scientifi c area. Fortunately, two other
parties jumped in. From the beginning there were commercial vendors
(such as Schrödinger or Tripos) who integrated their existing tools into
KNIME. The number of such companies has grown tremendously in
recent years. A growing number of community members have also started
developing extensions, which they provide free of charge to the
community. Initially they were scattered over different locations, but
since 2011 many of them are centrally hosted on the offi cial KNIME
server. This has benefi ts for the users, who have a central access point to
obtain extensions for KNIME and do not need to search and collect them
from various sources, while developers also benefi t from the fact that
they are provided with a source code repository as well as a nightly build
service, a web page, and a discussion forum. At the time of writing, seven
different projects exist in the KNIME Community Contributions [3] and
many others are already in the queue. Remarkably, not all projects are
from universities or other governmentally funded groups, but also come
from industry.
6.3 Benefi ts of 'professional open source'
The term 'professional open source' stands for a business model where a
vendor provides support and commercial extensions to an otherwise
open source program. This concept was successfully pioneered by
companies such as Red Hat or MySQL. In the same fashion, KNIME.
com offers the 'KNIME Professional' package, which adds personal
support and access to emergency patches in addition to the free open
source version (see
http://www.knime.org/products
for details). This is
especially useful when KNIME is used in production environments. To
facilitate collaboration inside or between groups in a company, KNIME.
com also provides the KNIME Team Space and the KNIME Server which
enable (besides other features) easy sharing of workfl ows and meta-node
templates.
Not only is the 'professional' aspect benefi cial to (industry) users, but
also the open source 'core' has several advantages for all user groups.
First of all, the usage is completely free of charge, no matter how many
computers it is installed on. This may not be an issue for some companies
with regard to using the graphical user interface on a limited number of
desktop computers, but as soon as it comes to deploying KNIME on a
large compute cluster or even in a cloud, the benefi ts of open source and
its licenses are obvious. The latter is especially interesting because KNIME
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