Re: A commercial response - RE: Micro-Manager at the ASCB meeting
Posted by
Sally_Dowling on
URL: http://confocal-microscopy-list.275.s1.nabble.com/Micro-Manager-at-the-ASCB-meeting-tp1627182p1631211.html
Dear List,
When I responded to the original announcement
I was unaware this was free academic software.
I was probably reacting to the numerous
Compucyte "ads" couched as technical workshops, and overspoke.
Please accept my deepest apologies and
know that I was speaking as an individual, albeit I use my BD mail.
Thanks to Craig Rappaport, my coworker,
for bringing this to my attention since I did not see a response to me
personally.
Thank you for you patience and forgiveness,
Sally
Sally D. Dowling, Ph..D.
Technical Sales
BD Biosciences - Bioimaging
Systems
15010 Broschart Road
Rockville, MD 20850
USA
t. 301.340.7320 x155 (direct
to cell phone)
f. 301.340.9775
e-mail address: [hidden email]
www.bdbiosciences.com/bioimaging
| From:
| Kevin Ryan <[hidden email]>
|
| To:
| [hidden email]
|
| Date:
| 12/08/2008 04:51 PM
|
| Subject:
| A commercial response - RE: Micro-Manager
at the ASCB meeting |
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:CONFOCALMICROSCOPY@...]
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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