Don,
I dealt with some of your points, e.g., standards, in my reply
to Tom.
Regarding your Internet vs. Compuserve, Biotechnet, etc.
analogy, I'd like to point out simply that Internet has been around
for a long time (including Arpanet which is its predecessor). I'm not
sure when Compuserve was founded (most likely after Arpanet started up
in the 60s), and Biotechnet is a newcomer. The point is that the
government was providing the services that you mention *first* and did
not move into an area already occupied by commercial firms.
The biotech software industry however is over ten years old
and the government actually encouraged it previously by forbidding the
GenBank contractors to produce analysis software. This was done
explicitly when GenBank first came into existence because the database
provider might have an unfair advantage over others due to their early
access to the sequence data. Now, ten years later, a potential
challenge to this industry comes along in the form of a new government
agency. The timing in the case of NCBI is completely different from
your examples. Biotech software companies have always been aware that
they had to compete against academic public domain developers; there
was never any warning that they might have to take on an NIH-sponsored
agency. Biotechnet, on the other hand, not only knew about the
existence of the Internet when starting its business, but it also uses
Internet to help its users gain access to its host computer.
Nice try, but no cigar 8-)!
Dave Kristofferson
