Simon Coles is CTO of Amphora Research Systems (a company I do not know) and in the business of Electronic Lab Notebooks. I know nothing about their products but would like to propagate the statements he just made on Open Source in reply to a question on LinkedIn (btw, my LinkedIn account):

We use a lot of Open Source components in our products, and I know we’re not alone.

He also gives why they do so, quoting from the full arguments in his blog:

  • The Open Source stuff just works better
  • Support is better
  • Licensing issues go away
  • It is dramatically cheaper for our customers to deploy
  • We have much more latitude in deployment options

I am not sure if this involves open source cheminformatics, but asked about that… the whole article is worth reading.

eln  opensource