OK, I know I recently said I gave up on open source. I must confess that I meant that comment only in the context of US Health Care software, where powerful entities have too much vested in the current state of affairs. When you have a market that is very large, and Health Care software in the US is a plus $80 Billion industry, then it's going to get a lot of attention. But in research, especially academic research, things are different. Since the current focus of a lot of academic health care research is on 'translational' or bench to bedside, i.e. technology transfer, one must wonder if market forces will stand in the way? But in a blog post on the ACM's website, I found another possible outcome - what will be needed for some of the largest scientific problems of our day, simply will not be developed by the market!
It's been a long time since I let my ACM membership lapse. The press of getting things done with commercial systems sort of made most of CACM irrelevant. But in time, good ideas should make their way from the lab to the product, but in this blog entry by Michael Stonebraker, he thinks that won't happen with scientific data management and furthermore he thinks the problem is too big for any one academic institution - hence an organized open-source project.
http://www.cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/22489-dbmss-for-science-applications-a-possible-solution/fulltext
For those who don't know Stonebraker, he is one of the "academic to industry" pioneers in RDBMS land, having been behind the creation of Ingress which later morphed into MS SQLServer.
No comments:
Post a Comment