A scientific basis for Open Source Software

I've felt this needed to be the policy standard at public (tax payer funded) universities since a biochem group I was a member of was granted a "free" license for some of Schrodinger's molecular tool-sets (associated with their Glide™ molecular binding libraries). I asked at various meetings "how can our results be published if we aren't allowed to know the mathematics behind their essential 'scoring function'"? I was waved-off with "it's enough that we publish that we used a particular version of their software" -- which was a proprietary blackbox. Our publications thus became free advertising - as was always their plan.

I was then afterwards deemed a trouble-maker as the university continued its slide toward "corporate cooperativity". "I suppose you'll be wanting next that we convert away from MSWord documents?", I was asked. "well yes... but let's work on the smaller infections first" [wink]