Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
22.7 Conclusion
As I hope I have highlighted, just as under-secretary Kennedy explained
in his answer at the beginning of this chapter, there are many costs
associated with the use of open source software in government
departments or in industry. As soon as there is a need to store or process
sensitive data such as medical records, then the costs and complexity can
increase considerably. The cost-benefi ts of open source software being
free to download and use can quickly be lost once training, support,
security, legal reviews, update management, insurance and so on are
taken into account.
However, in many areas of scientifi c research, open source software
projects are truly world leading. For industry to get maximum value from
open source software it needs to actively participate in the development
process. Organisations like Pistoia show one way that this participation
can be done, where many companies come together in areas that are
important (yet pre-competitive). This approach has many benefi ts.
■
Shared requirements - allowing industry to speak with one voice,
rather than many different ones. This can obviously help with
understanding how software might be used, in prioritising future work
and in improving and adopting open standards.
■
Shared costs and risks - with many companies all sharing the cost of
things like expert security reviews of software, the share of the cost to
each company can quickly become very reasonable.
■
Feedback and collaboration - even if industry is not participating
directly with the writing of a given open source software package, it
can help to build relationships with the authors. This way the authors
can better understand industry requirements. Importantly, authors
will not see a list of security vulnerabilities merely as a criticism, but
rather as a contribution to making the software better for everyone.
Open source software is very likely to play an important role in the life
sciences industry in the future, with companies not only using open
source software, but also actively contributing back to the community.
Indeed, earlier in this topic (Chapter 1) we saw a great example of exactly
this from Claus Stie Kallesøe's description of the LSP4All software.
Another exciting example of industry using open source software to help
drive innovation is demonstrated by the Pistoia Alliance's recent 'Sequence
Squeeze' competition. The Pistoia Alliance advertised a challenge to
identify improved algorithms to compress the huge volumes of data
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