I have to say, we should all be super grateful for the OSS community. There's so much free non-publicly funded continuously supported OSS available within a click of a button. I am a data scientist, and everyday I am amazed how powerful the anaconda distribution (and its over 150 included packages) is. Is there any industry on Earth that has anything like OSS?
I have wondered this before as well. I can't think of any industry that is as open as FOSS. There is FOSS available for literally everything you could ever want or need[0].
FOSS enabled me to learn about programming computers with zero cost (other than the hardware of course). Sure the paid closed source tools are probably "better" (usually that mostly means prettier) but it amazes me that anyone on earth can grab a free Linux distro and it will come with access to a huge collection of software that will allow that person to learn and better themselves. In the developed world that doesn't really seem all that amazing. I mean most people would just buy a Mac and go to an expensive university but in a lot of the world where money and education are close to non-existent it is truly incredible.
I am glad we live in a world with FOSS and with people who are extremely passionate about it (EFF, RMS, etc.). It puts pressure on the big software companies to not be total bastards. Imagine a world where only the elite educated had access to the software tools needed to drive innovation. A world controlled by Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Intel, Google, Oracle, etc.
[0] Okay now somebody will point out an edge case ;)
Kind of: Take DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) for example which sets standards used in hardware (like normed screws or normed metal alloys). Albeit not free (as in free beer) it guarantees that I can buy eg. screws with guaranteed minimal properties from different vendors. I would see this at least somehow equivalent to open source software, which can be copied at minimal marginal cost and thus is easy to provide for free (as in free beer).
I moved from Computer Science into bioinformatics / computational immunology.
Bioinformatics is fatally infected by the associated culture of biology. Tools get squirreled away until published in a non-open venue, then eventually dumped online in some difficult to install manner.
It's tricky to pinpoint exactly when modern "bioinformatics" started. Some notable times are 1979 when the Los Alamos Sequence Database started, 1982 when that became GenBank, and certainly by 1990 when the Human Genome Project started.
GenBank is "an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenBank ). Most journals now require that sequences be entered into GenBank before publication.
I'll add a few historical observations. The early work at Los Alamos was on Sun machines running Sybase (1987, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase ). These are serious Unix fans, who quickly took to perl when it came out. I think some of the support for SybPerl came from bioinformatics; the SybPerl, OraPerl, and other *Perl systems helped create the extension system for perl5. (I am not able to verify that, though the author of SybPerl, Michael Peppler, consulted in the mid-1990s for "Research Genetics" http://www.peppler.org/resume.html .)
Unix people in the early 1990s were serious perl fans. The most popular perl4 library for CGI programming was cgi-lib.pl, by Steven Brenner, a computational biologist/bioinformatics researcher. It was replaced in perl5 by CGI.pm, by Lincoln Stein, another bioinformatics researcher.
This gives a hint that bioinformatics has not only a close connection to the technologies needed for the first dot-com era, but also that the field itself tends towards open resources.
A subset of OSS - the R/Bioconductor community is full of free software fanatics, and anyway all academic software is necessarily, without thought, free software.
