A perceived conflict between Open Source/free software and
commercial products has been around for quite a long time.
Twenty years ago when I started developing imaging software I had
an NIH customer ask “Why can’t you _give_ your software away like NIH
Image?!?” (I told him I would gladly do so when the Federal government started
paying my salary.) Certain people in the commercial side of things at the time were
quite upset that the government was supporting someone to compete with us.
As it turned out, however, some of our best customers were
previous users of these freeware packages. Best, as they had the experience
with imaging software to recognize what it could and couldn’t do, and the
knowledge to move up to a commercial package with wider/faster/more
capabilities once they hit the freeware limits. They had the education to know
what they wanted.
Open Source software/hardware has the advantage of being ‘free’,
but that freedom may cost a considerable investment in people; the grad student
who maintains it, the technician who knows what wire does what, the involvement
in keeping up with a wide group of contributors who are fixing bugs and adding
capabilities. It’s a real tradeoff between dollars spent and the time invested to
use/maintain it. I have yet to see a free software product whose documentation
matches the average level of commercial software. And if the support community doesn’t
pass a certain critical level, like Linux or the Apache web server, having a
principal developer move on may mean the end of that package. Open Source/free
software also tends to have a more limited feature set, as it tends to be
driven by the developers interests rather than market pressure and dollars.
Commercial software may not do exactly what you want; it’s a
truism in commercial development that 10% of the customers require 90% of the
development time, and open software may represent the clearest way to get some
experiment specific item functioning. But for the other 90% of the features and
customers, you get code developed over many years, QA tested before release,
and used by a _lot_ of other people. There are often more/broader
features in the commercial products, due to the larger number of customers
requesting them and more man-years in development. We have something on the
order of 50,000+ customers over the years between the various packages for our
company alone, and if a issue or new technique pops up we hear about it and
have a great deal of motivation to work on it. Many of the commercial products
themselves have interfaces for users to add new capabilities, just as with the
open software.
So both free and commercial software have their niche – open/free
software for people with more time than money, or needs simply not addressed by
current commercial products, or who enjoy developing their own tools;
commercial software for a wider range of people using more established
techniques, or who don’t want to invest or even have the human resources for a
less supported product.
I do have my concerns about sponsored ‘free’ software – Micro-Manager
(and NIH Image/ImageJ before it) are supported by NIH grants instead of
customers or donated developer time. They aren’t developed with users donated
time like Linux/Apache. What happens to sponsored software users if the grants
run out? Will the support be there over the long haul? On the other hand, what
effect on the commercial market and its products does government sponsored
software have, other than reducing commercial opportunity and investment? But
that’s really a discussion between commercial interests and sponsoring
agencies, rather than individual products and projects.
Kevin Ryan
Senior Project Manager
Media Cybernetics, Inc.
From: Confocal Microscopy
List [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Nico
Stuurman
Sent: Sunday, December 07, 2008 7:11 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Micro-Manager at the ASCB meeting
If you are attending the upcoming ASCB meeting in San
Francisco, December 13-17 (http://www.ascb.org/meetings/),
please come see us in booth 2009 in the Exhibition space.
Micro-Manager (http://micro-manager.org)
is Open Source software for microscope image acquisition. ….
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