Open source from India
Gajendra P.S. Raghava
Tuesday, 15 July 2008 18:43 UTC
Dear Friends,
Recently I write my view on "Role of Money in Indian Science. It was discussed lot on net and got mix reaction. Today I am writing about another important point “Open source intiatives” or freeware or public domain. Best of my knowledge no big initiative have been taken from India for developing world renowned software (like Linux, GNU); though number of groups have developed freeware including our group . The question arises whether it is due to lack of our expertise (as it requre high level skill) or it is due to our culture. It may be due to lack of infrastructure or resources. I wants to know view of other colleagues.
I also wants to know whether we are in position to initiate mega project on freeware. I wish to know reaction of community whether we are ready for this type of work ( I mean Indians are ready to contribute for public). We are starting one such project CRDD for developing computational resources for drug discovery. May I know view of other members on this project.
Regards
Raghava
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Replies
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Interesting thoughts. Indians are skilled enough to initiate and develop freewares software. As you have rightly pointed out due to our culture, we do not wish to do that. In India everything is linked with money making. I will give my hand in developing resources for drug discovery.
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I finished my M.Sc in Bioinformatics this year, and after staying jobless for sometime, I switched to IT sector. But the fact is that I still love what I learnt during my masters course. People like me would be more than happy to contribute without expecting anyhting in return. This is where the role of Open Source comes in. World over, the success of open source movement has been because of its enthusiasts who contributed without expecting anything in return. And as Kumaran rightly said, we are skilled more than enough for this, if just change our attitude a bit. I came across one of the initiatives named SysborgTB, an open source drug discovery intiative by CSIR, and I must say that it is a thing of beauty. I am still trying to figure out the stuff in it whnever I get time. As an individual, working on such initiatives needs only a computer and an internet connection in terms of infrastructure, so that is not an issue. I would agree with Raghava that the culture may be an issue because we expect somethng in return for whatever we do. But as time passes, and as the initiative become a success, more and more enthusiasts will start budding.
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I apologize for my late reciprocation. Somehow, I’m not getting alerts for the messages posted.
I appreciate your thought on this Dr. Raghava. To me, we Indians have lots of passions at the start and it starts getting declined after initial enthu the student-researcher puts. That’s because of lack of ineptness and will. Today, even if there are no infrastructure, I think we could still be able to do through a computer and Internet connection. There were good number of success stories on these lines in Indian science.
An open source community is highly inevitable in Indian community provided people don’t make it a hype again. The reason why we don’t have expert students to move this forward is most of us stick to either database development or molecular modelling part (cheminformatics) which makes the IT Engineer to easily settle there. But a pinch of smartness from a Biologist is anticipated – S/he should be able to understand the inherent goals of his Biology/bioinformatics experiment and I’m sure then biologists can exchange good rapport with IT engineers. Vice versa: The same is the case with IT Engineers
I wish CRDD and the team developers the very best.
Remain sincerely
Prash
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