has been running for years in the IT industry, see :

http://www.opensource.org/

It has proved very successful in countering the dominance of a single player, Microsoft, and offered alternatives such as Linux as an operating system and Java as a development language.

In the case of IT though this open system initiative happened for two main reasons:

i) Demand by customers afraid of "single vendor tie in".
ii) Commercially, a defense measure by large companies, (e.g. Sun and IBM), who assumed, rightly, that they were better off fighting Microsoft together rather than individually.

In the bio world we certainly have point (i), demand by customers/patients, we don't have point (ii) though, as far as I can see.

Through open source the participants gain all the advantages we are looking for, access to a larger development community, speed to market and choice, what a great situation this would be if extended to bio.

On the other hand, commercially there are no parallels to IT. There is no 400 pound gorilla ruling the jungle (Microsoft) that may threaten other companies and hence no reason for a company to share its hard earnt knowledge with other rivals. Indeed often the entire value of a company (e.g. Neurologix) is derived from its IPR in a certain field. If it gave away its IPR, it is no longer viable as a company.

I do not believe open source will work for bio, I do believe there should be greater input from collaborative governments ensuring promising developments/companies are adequately funded, making the company "state owned" if necessary. This collaborative government body should facilitate communication where appropriate, a job that seems to fall to charities such as MJFF at present.

Discretionary open source is not an option imho, co-ordinated government initiative is my favourite.

But neither will happen anyway, but it is good to sort out the problems of the world on the internet

Take care,
Neil.