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Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 07:32:18 -0500

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Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 12:26:40 +0100
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From: Armel Le Bail <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: CCL:RE:Anybody agrees with me
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Eugene Leitl wrote:

>The only way to push open standards realistically, whether in GUIs or
>deep code internals, is Open Source.
>...
>though typically the interactivity/GUI concept of free code is
>somewhat underdeveloped. However, this is nothing intrinsical, nothing
>which can't be fixed with a bit of effort.

A few discordant opinions, I am not at all optimistic about
free as opposite to commercial software and GUIs:

More than a bit of effort would be needed ! Old academic
research ideas of free circulation of software are continuously
decreasing, in spite of Linux. And Linux will probably not stay
that cheap after its introduction on the Wall Street market...

Seems to me that the reason why free circulation is
decreasing is exactly because of GUIs. Graphical user
interfaces are not at all always necessary in old fashion
calculations which just need two files which can be edited
by a simple ASCII editor :
     - datafile
     - parameters and command file
Your just have then to run the program and obtain the result
in new files, printable or viewable by some displaying software. 

Unfortunately, programs are bought by deciders. Deciders have
not necessarily any skill in the domain for which they are
in charge to buy software. They are very sensitive to shiny GUIs
and I suspect they make decision on that aspect of the programs.
A lot of chemistry programs are more and more expensive
(>1000 US$). Some are even inaccessible. For instance
the Cerius2 suite from MSI has satellites attaining almost
50000 US$ for 3 years (PowderSolve). Only ten or so of the
biggest pharmaceutical companies could afford it. Free
software exist for academic research, doing almost the same, 
if not better, but without any GUI (running with a command
line, in a DOS box and so on). Having to buy programs,
you also try to sell your own programs... and this is a 
vicious circle.

Building a museum of more or less old and famous source
codes in crystallography shows that most are Fortran codes.
              http://sdpd.univ-lemans.fr/museum/
Very few GUIs under some Visual Fortran exist, none
is open. The scientific global community market has never
seemed attractive to Microsoft who abandoned its Fortran
compiler. The Digital Visual Fortran compiler inherited of that
vacant place, but Digital is also a company a bit losing speed,
now in the Compaq basket. A bad new is the recent cancelled
publication of a book I was expecting : "Modern Fortran
Programming with Digital Visual". The fact that very few
of the legacy Fortran code was ported by academic researchers
to modern GUI versions is significant of either they consider
GUIs not really useful or they consider that programming
is the affair of programmers, and programming was not at all
or not enough introduced in the learning cursus of chemists.
The consequence is today that laboratories and also school
budgets are  crunched more and more deeply by commercial
software and databases expenses. 

Armel Le Bail - Universite du Maine, Laboratoire des Fluorures,
CNRS ESA 6010, Av. O. Messiaen, 72085 Le Mans Cedex 9, France
http://www.cristal.org/