Is Biopharma ready for open source software

In the future, 2008 may be looked at as the year when open source software finally became viable in the biopharmaceutical industry. To be clear, I don't mean software that can be used across industries but only those designed for operations specifically and uniquely performed in our industry.

A second caveat is that the term "viable" may only apply to the software products themselves (i.e. the vendors) but not necessarily the companies that would use or benefit from them. In other words, the technology is ready while the industry may not be!

We'll dive into the relevance of and issues surrounding open source software by answering a few questions.