Box 2. Are life sciences companies ready for open source?

Economic incentives are relentless. If open source makes money, companies will adopt it sooner or later. That said, progress will be faster if industry is open-minded. Recent events suggest that life sciences companies already understand openness and do not hesitate to use it as a business tactic. Such practices date back to 1999, when 10 pharmaceutical companies funded the SNP Consortium to put genome data in the public domain so that their competitors could not obtain patents to corner the market. [1] More recent examples include Pfizer's decision to disclose the contents of its drug discovery pipeline [2], Syngenta's decision to share its rice genome data [3], and Novartis' decision to release their genome-wide type 2 diabetes map over the Web. [4] So far, this sharing has been largely limited to releases of basic data. At least arguably, parts are closer to a working product, and to that extent would require at least a small leap of imagination. That, however, is what smart businessmen are supposed to do.

Janet Hope, Open Source Biotechnology (December 2004) (unpublished PhD dissertation, Australian National University), available at http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/hope.pdf.

Anon, 'Pfizer Pipeline as of December 20, 2006' available at http://www.pfizer.com/pfizer/help/download/product_pipeline_view.pdf.

Dennis Normile, 'Syngenta Agrees to Wider Release,' Science 296: 1785 (2002).

http://www.novartis.com/newsroom/news/index.shtml (item for Feb. 12 2007).