2013-01-28

Free for non-commercial academic use only sucks

Scientific software released for free under an "academic only"/"non-commercial" licence really irks me, even if the source code is included. This is mainly because it isn't open source, and I believe science should be open, but this also causes a whole lot of headaches. Right now I'm particularly disappointed by the GATK licensing debacle from The Broad Institute - and I'm not alone in this, for example Mick Watson has just blogged about why the GATK re-licensing matters and there has been plenty of comment on Twitter.