Re: [sdpd] Workshop announcement

[Armel Le Bail <armel...@fluo.univ-lemans.fr>]

Thanks a lot for this comment.

And more provocative opinions :

Good science can be made everywhere, certainly.

If the best science is done at commercial institutions, then
people at academic intitutions may start to have some
difficulties : budget reduction, and impossibility to buy
expensive software sold by commercial intitutions... And
finally, know-how lost for the public domain.

If academic researchers transmit exclusively the result of their
work to commercial institutions, this could be considered
as a perversion of the system. I understand that grants can
be obtained by this way, but a long term vision shows
that closing program codes will only benefit to the commercial
intitutions.

As a conlusion : commercial institutions are doing their
job. This may not be the case for academic institutions.

Just one example : ESRF is part of the MSI pharmaceutical
consortium. ESRF, as an academic institution, has paid
something like 45000 US$ for 3 years for using the PowderSolve
package (pharmaceutical companies have paid much more :
100000 US$, maybe ?). Anyway, ESRF could have used
that money for a post-doc with skills in developing software,
during one year. And this post-doc could have built an
open-source program for academy...

If Endeavour is accessible to everyone having paid for a
licence, this is not the case of PowderSolve. People going to
the Bayreuth  workshop may feel a bit frustrated to see a demo
of an unavailable program (unless they are working with the
few pharmaceutical companies in the MSI consortium).

I would say that "workshop" is not fully appropriate since
it looks like more to a prospective market meeting.

The good thing is that, if the meeting is really efficient,
SDPD (stable at 50 structures determined per year) may
see some rebirth if each of the 100 participants publish
one structure next year. Let us see ;-).
  
Best,
Armel Le Bail
http://www.cristal.org/course/

PS1- Other commercial software in demonstration at Bayreuth :
TOPAS (Bruker), DASH (CCDC), plus some other more or
less closed codes (ROTSEARCH, OCTOPUS...).

PS2 - Use ESPOIR instead - free - open source - and maybe
a Windows GUI soon (free and open source as well) - we are 2 poor
guys working on it since one month. 

> >PS- Some provocative opinions :
> >
> >If the organizers or some of the speakers would like to
> >subscribe to the SDPD mailing list, things would be more simple.
> >Using Internet is not developing so fast in science, curiously.
> >Many people only want to speak during official conferences,
> >or only want to write in regular publications. A way of life.
> >Many speakers at the above workshop are representing
> >commercial programs. You will have demonstrations, but
> >you should not expect to go back home with a free version.
> >Comments ?
> >
>
>
>At least, each participant will obtain a free CD-ROM with the current
>ENDEAVOUR-version (most probably time-limited to the end of October) and a
>demo-version of our structure-visualization program DIAMOND.
>
>Holger Putz
>Crystal Impact