nodalpoint.org - BioJava - Comments

announcement vs. advertisement

yogibear — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 18:09:34 -0400

I have enquired in the irc #nodalpoint channel before posting, and Neil Saunders was kind enough to get back to me and enourage me to post. Announcements, by definition, are made by the people who have developed the product, aren't they? So yes, announcements are a special form of advertisement, and yes, I am from Biomatters. However, in this case the advertisement is for a freeware product.

I have never claimed that Geneious is open source. It is freeware, but closed source. We control the platform only in so far as we are the only ones who can make new platform releases. We can not take the existing platform, which we have provided for free, back from the community.

So the community will always be free to use that platform, and to develop plugins that extend the existing freeware version of the platform. I think it should be obvious that the community benefits from this possibility. What if the Eclipse platform was freeware closed source? People could still use Eclipse productively, and develop as many plugins as they feel like.

I personally think you should really reserve your aggressions for people who try to get your money, not for people who have just given you free stuff.

Please post announcements in

Greg — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 10:03:06 -0400

Please post announcements in the forums. Also if you are from Biomatters then this is not just an announcement it is advertising, in which case please let us know. For the moment I'll give this post published status, however not to the front page.

Also, I'm curious about Biomatter's claims regarding open source. The product itself is not open source, it only provides a plug-in API ? So that means you control the platform, in which case how does the benefit the community ?

complications

Neil — Mon, 24 May 2004 09:40:52 -0400

Mmm, that does seem complicated...I suppose there are ramifications to a PHP script with a "shell_exec('blastall'....)", but that's how I tend to do it :-)
Some of those articles are good though; there's one somewhere on how to integrate BLAST with SGE on heterogeneous networks.