Open Source Drug Discovery: Finding A Niche

In retrospect, it was probably inevitable that admirers of open source software production would look for a second act.  Before the 1990s, most commentators had imagined that the  landscape of innovation consisted almost entirely of patents and copyright.  This was never really true – careful policy makers have always considered other options such as prizes, grants and contract research – but in the closing, patent-obsessed decades of the 20th Century the illusion was hard to shake.  To observers who had never imagined such a thing, the realization that workers could create new products without central control or private ownership was unexpected.3  The fact that open source had occurred in one of society’s hardest innovation problems – complex computer operating systems – seemed doubly miraculous.  Like moon rockets and integrated circuits, operating systems required far more labor than any single human lifetime could supply.  In the Twentieth Century, that had meant big, hierarchical teams.  It didn’t really matter whether the engineers were in Santa Monica or Minsk, the long rows of drafting boards and (later) computer terminals looked pretty much the same.  The system worked, of course, but anyone who’s ever read Dilbert knows that it wasn’t pretty.  Now, suddenly, the open source movement had shown that at least one complex invention – computer software – could be organized in a completely different way.  Why not others?

Stephen M. Maurer UMKC Law Review 76:2. (PDF)

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « CrossTalks presentation
• » New look for the tropicaldisease.org

• BROWSE / IN Article
• « TDI/TSL manuscript
• » 2008 Target Competition for Neglected Diseases (UC Berkeley)