Other: Accelrys petition followup

[Steve Thompson-7]

Hi all - re. http://www.petitiononline.com/gcg/

A huge THANKS to all of you that signed my petition!  Within the first
week online I got almost 150 signatures, and John Devereux himself most
recently signed it.  I sent Rob Brown of Accelrys an 'official' copy of
the petition and the signatures at the end of last month.  However, but
not surprisingly, I have yet to receive one word back from Accelrys.  I
realize that we can't force them to do anything, but I at least thought
that they would have the courtesy to respond to it somehow.  The petition
did result in a news story though.  GenomeWeb News' bioinformatics
newsletter, BioInform, published the story on April 4th.  See my copy at:

  http://bio.fsu.edu/~stevet/BioInformGCG.pdf

Some may feel that the BioInform story suggests the petition was merely a
means of influencing commercial negotiations with Accelrys regarding code
release, and have nothing to do with public domain availability, but this
was never my objective.  It is and remains a plea not to kill the package,
and in particular SeqLab, by whatever means possible, but preferably
within some type of open source arrangement.  Furthermore, Accelrys argues
in the article that many more people have signed the petition than
subscribe to the package, and that this somehow invalidates the petition.
This is completely irrelevant as the GCG license has always been to an
institution, allowing as many people in that institution access as wanted,
not to individual investigators.  Here at FSU I have supported over 100
GCG users with one GCG license over the years.  June should be interesting
for us all.  We'll have to see if Accelrys honors their commitment to
those of us with "perpetual" licenses to provide non-node-locked, non-
expiring versions of the license after June 30, 2008.  Time will tell.

                              Cheers - Steve
                                                 Steven M. Thompson
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