Bioclipse pirated
A company called InfoCom, located in Arizona, advertises a product called iBioTech , which by all evidence is identical with Bioclipse. They say their iBioTech product has a plugin for chemoinformatics call “bc_cdk” (surprise :-)) and one called “bc_jmol” for 3D visualization.
While this is something that we have explicitly not tried to prevent; still it is kind of appalling to see it happen. My personal expectation on having my/our code being used by others was always that they would offer additional services and still acknowledge the original authors.
The case that we are currently seeing includes renaming and the pretension that the prodcut has been created by them (citation: iBioTech from InfoCom laboratories). The question here is of course: Is this covered by the Bioclipse license or not.
I was surprised that my first two attempts to dig into the Bioclipse license led into nowhere. There was no such thing as a LICENSE file in the top level directory in bioclipse trunk. The next thing to do was to look at the code of net.bioclipse.BioclipsePlugin.java, which in my opinion should contain a header clearly stating the license for this code. Nothing there.
But of course, the Bioclipse website has a full coverage of the license issues with Bioclipse. I would clearly say that the redistribution of a number of parts of Bioclipse, including CDK, requires the distributor to make it clear to the customer where the source code is available, which then automatically implies giving proper credit.
My feeling is that this is a case to further investigate.
Categorised as: Bioclipse, Blue Obelisk, Open Science, Open Source, Scientific Culture
From InfoCom’s website:
“Our shared values of TRUST, RESPECT, INTEGRITY, COMPETENCE, MATURITY AND HAPPINESS have not changed since 1985. They define who we are as people not just as a company.”
What? They’ve always been this duplicitious? 🙂
Wow, this is surprising and I am sure that one presentation or one booth on a ‘modeling intelligence’ conference might result in some unexpected feedback for those people.
I do not mind that someone comes up with a business model, I am more surprised about the bold manner this is done here. I have the feeling that someone in market research did here a pretty bad job ! In this area people know who has done what and I just cannot believe that this works for this community.
On the other hand, I must say that I like the idea of having commercial support 😉 So, maybe someone else should come-up with a business model, which actually feeds tools like CDK, Bioclipse, and KNIME? Only if an official support structure exists, there is a way that people might buy-in ….
Sure, the wild “repackaging” of a Free Software in a
proprietary product is not recommended.
However, I always wondered wether
the concepts in LUCY,
without the Sky and the Diamonds,
were not directly taken from LSD…
Again…
After a friendly mail exchange with Christoph,
it appears that he was not aware of my work
on the LSD software at the time he published
his work on LUCY.
This “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
(LSD) – LUCY possible word game is only
a pure coincidence, from which I wrongly
drew suspiscions.
Reader, please, do as if my preceding post
was never written.