Comments on: My Article on Internet-based tools for communication and collaboration in chemistry http://www.chemspider.com/blog/my-article-on-internet-based-tools-for-communication-and-collaboration-in-chemistry.html Building Community for Chemists Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:07:05 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.2 By: Clark D Jeffries http://www.chemspider.com/blog/my-article-on-internet-based-tools-for-communication-and-collaboration-in-chemistry.html/comment-page-1#comment-41040 Clark D Jeffries Sat, 24 May 2008 15:59:12 +0000 http://www.chemspider.com/blog/?p=530#comment-41040 I think the author makes an excellent case for the positive and substantial impact in biocheminformatics of "open source." Background reasoning: Sometimes a change is quantitatively so great that it is qualitative. The moveable type printing press in the 1450s made recipes, songs, bawdy stories, and religious tracts available to all who could ~read. People did not need to know a teacher to learn from his experiences and reasoning, or even to live contemporaneously with the teacher. The durability of printed works in effect endowed the new, common brain with immortality--but low-speed transmission rates. A second such advance was the advent of TCP/IP (1970s) that made email and WWW possible. I regard TCP/IP as the greatest invention (by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn) of the 20th Century. Among others credited with enabling the technology are a guy who in the early 1980s had the foresight to fund Internet research with government money (Al Gore), and the various guys who were smart enough to imagine, design, and implement the services it could support (among the foremost is Tim Berners-Lee). Also key was the development of convenient human-machine interfaces (as predicted by J.C.R. Licklider). In effect, humans now have one, giant, immortal brain with high-speed transmission. In many ways the development of the Internet was "open source" in the sense that its creators did it mainly because it was interesting work, with perhaps some inklings about its eventual global employment and usefulness. I hope that open source biocheminformatics will become one of the best organized and most comprehensive manifestations of the phenomenon. I think the author makes an excellent case for the positive and substantial impact in biocheminformatics of “open source.”

Background reasoning: Sometimes a change is quantitatively so great that it is qualitative. The moveable type printing press in the 1450s made recipes, songs, bawdy stories, and religious tracts available to all who could ~read. People did not need to know a teacher to learn from his experiences and reasoning, or even to live contemporaneously with the teacher. The durability of printed works in effect endowed the new, common brain with immortality–but low-speed transmission rates.

A second such advance was the advent of TCP/IP (1970s) that made email and WWW possible. I regard TCP/IP as the greatest invention (by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn) of the 20th Century. Among others credited with enabling the technology are a guy who in the early 1980s had the foresight to fund Internet research with government money (Al Gore), and the various guys who were smart enough to imagine, design, and implement the services it could support (among the foremost is Tim Berners-Lee). Also key was the development of convenient human-machine interfaces (as predicted by J.C.R. Licklider).

In effect, humans now have one, giant, immortal brain with high-speed transmission. In many ways the development of the Internet was “open source” in the sense that its creators did it mainly because it was interesting work, with perhaps some inklings about its eventual global employment and usefulness.

I hope that open source biocheminformatics will become one of the best organized and most comprehensive manifestations of the phenomenon.

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