Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
resolved by the 'vendor supported' model that Pistoia is exploring. First,
for question 2, commercial vendors would agree to host open source
software and use their current support solutions to address the issues of
their industry users. In particular, ensuring that an expert inside their
organisations would always be able to respond to support requests. In
terms of question 3 concerning training, the Sequence Services Project
selected software to host that already had excellent online training
modules that had been written by the public institute that wrote the
software. Finally, question 4, the challenge of updating the software and
its underlying data when a new production version was released, is also
not insurmountable. Indeed, a one month lag from public release to
hosted service is perfectly acceptable while whatever testing was
undertaken by the hosting provider. Thus, the vendor-hosted model of
free/open source software addresses some of the key initial challenges to
industry adoption. However, the project's aim was to go further and
investigate the remaining issues.
Perhaps surprisingly, there can be some challenges to the adoption of
open source software in a commercial environment due to the licence
terms that are used when releasing software. Take the following statement
which has been taken from an open source licence (but anonymised).
You agree that you will deliver, and you will cause all sublicensees
to deliver, to XXX copies of all Modifi cations that are made to the
Software, on or before the date on which the Modifi cations are
distributed to any third party, and you hereby grant to XXX, and
will cause all of your sublicensees to grant to XXX, a non-exclusive,
royalty-free, irrevocable, non-terminable license to use, reproduce,
make derivative works of, display, perform, and distribute any and
all Modifi cations in source code and binary code form for any
purpose and to sublicense such rights to others.
From the point of view of the author of the software, it is not unreasonable
to expect people who are using and benefi ting from your hard work to
contribute back any improvements they add. However, this may mean
that the software could not be easily used with any commercial tools. It
may be completely reasonable for a company to want to put some user
authentication process into the software, or perhaps a plug-in that allows
the use of commercial visualisation software. At the very minimum,
lawyers now need to be involved (probably on both sides) to agree what
constitutes a 'modifi cation', and even if a third-party developer could be
commissioned by a company to do any work on the code without forcing
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