From stevet from bio.fsu.edu Wed Apr 23 12:41:04 2008 From: stevet from bio.fsu.edu (Steve Thompson) Date: Wed Apr 23 14:39:34 2008 Subject: [Info-gcg] Other: Accelrys petition followup Message-ID: <20080423114117.X29516@epsilon.bio.fsu.edu> 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 A C T G stevet@bio.fsu.edu \-/ http://bio.fsu.edu/~stevet/cv.html /\ /--| FSU SCS / BioInfo 4U /---/ |--/ Florida State University School of \-/ Computational Science /\ /--\ 1st floor DIRAC 150G |---\ Tallahassee, Florida \---\ 32306-4120 \--| 850-644-4490 \-/ /\ 2538 Winnwood Circle /--\ Valdosta, Georgia /---| 31601-7953 |--/ 229-249-9751 From stevet from bio.fsu.edu Fri Apr 25 08:16:28 2008 From: stevet from bio.fsu.edu (Steve Thompson) Date: Fri Apr 25 10:31:38 2008 Subject: [Info-gcg] Other: followup to Accelrys petition followup Message-ID: <20080425085739.N36764@epsilon.bio.fsu.edu> Hello all - A brief note to let you know what's happened since my posting this last Wednesday: Rob Brown of Accelrys did contact me, finally. He says, and I quote: "The petition and the subsequent BioInform article produced a significant response and generated inquiries from a number of third party companies who now wish to discuss various possibilities relating to GCG with us. We are now in the process of following up on all of those which is taking some time." So, it looks like some good has come out of the process, although this doesn't look like the open source type of arrangement that many of us hoped for. Regardless, it may mean that the package will not be dying. And, Accelrys sent me my new non-node-locked, non-expiring license key! Cheers - Steve Steven M. Thompson A C T G stevet@bio.fsu.edu \-/ http://bio.fsu.edu/~stevet/cv.html /\ /--| FSU SCS / BioInfo 4U /---/ |--/ Florida State University School of \-/ Computational Science /\ /--\ 1st floor DIRAC 150G |---\ Tallahassee, Florida \---\ 32306-4120 \--| 850-644-4490 \-/ /\ 2538 Winnwood Circle /--\ Valdosta, Georgia /---| 31601-7953 |--/ 229-249-9751 From stevet from bio.fsu.edu Sun Apr 27 19:08:49 2008 From: stevet from bio.fsu.edu (Steve Thompson) Date: Sun Apr 27 19:51:33 2008 Subject: [Info-gcg] Other: another followup (apology) Message-ID: <20080427200719.B51990@epsilon.bio.fsu.edu> Hi all - I would like to offer my apology to Accelrys and its employees for suggesting that the company would not follow through on their commitment to supply non-node-locked, non-expiring license keys to all current GCG custyomers with "perpetual" licenses. As I mentioned in my last posting Accelrys is now involved in that process and I have received my new key. It was never my intent to discredit Accelrys, nor its employess. I merely had not been informed that the process was underway. I am sorry that I miswrote and hope that any hard feelings can be overcome. Thank you. Cheers - Steve Steven M. Thompson A C T G stevet@bio.fsu.edu \-/ http://bio.fsu.edu/~stevet/cv.html /\ /--| FSU SCS / BioInfo 4U /---/ |--/ Florida State University School of \-/ Computational Science /\ /--\ 1st floor DIRAC 150G |---\ Tallahassee, Florida \---\ 32306-4120 \--| 850-644-4490 \-/ /\ 2538 Winnwood Circle /--\ Valdosta, Georgia /---| 31601-7953 |--/ 229-249-9751