You raised some other interesting points about purchasing procedures
in the UK that might merit further discussion. I am unsure as to
their applicability to the U.S.
> Perhaps my example should be the Intelligenetics Geneworks product,
> since at least Dr. Kristofferson can defend Intelligenetics on this
> forum.
I am not going to discuss individual products (I personally have no
involvement with the Geneworks project anyway and could not provide
much light on it.), but I will say only that people have always
complained about the price of most specialized software packages.
This occurs in a lot of fields besides mol. biol.
Most people do not recognize the costs that go in to producing
software, especially when they are used to having a low-paid grad
student write code for them (which may subsequently be unmaintainable
when said person moves on). These costs are real and do not disappear
if instead the government produces the software and gives it away;
they are only more palatable to scientists because they don't subtract
them immediately from their grants.
If overall scientific funding stays constant however, the money still
has to come from somewhere. If a government agency produces the
software, then this was accomplished as a result of a committee
decision for the benefit of everyone, instead of by individual
scientists personally deciding how to allocate their resources. It is
true that if the government did the job, they would not be trying to
recover a profit, so the overall cost might be less if all other
factors were equal. On the other hand actual costs might even go *up*
if there were so many users of the free software that technical
support demands became very large. Of course, in that case support
might simply be reduced or, in the worst case, abandoned to save
money. Those with sufficient knowledge might then turn to the
networks for support. But, on the other hand, maybe the government
software would be truly excellent and support would be minimal. Who
knows?? Maybe, even without competition, efficiency would not even
suffer at such an agency because of the dedication of the people
there. However, the issues debated earlier did not only involve
economics, and I am not going to rehash all of the earlier postings
here. Those who may still be interested can refer back to them.
The issue was also raised yet again about waste and redundancy in
products when companies compete against each other, etc. This is at
the basis of capitalism, and I am a bit surprised that it keeps coming
up.
Sincerely,
Dave Kristofferson
GenBank Manager
kristoff at genbank.bio.net
