Getting There from Here: Four Considerations for Transitioning to Open Development

For almost two years now, we at the NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology have been talking about how to create an open-development ecosystem around the digital resources that have been developed through the caBIG program.   We recognize that meeting the challenge of creating robust and useful tools to support the rapidly evolving needs of the cancer research community requires an open and collaborative approach to software development.  The good news is that is that all of the software that has been developed through this program is already open source, under the non-viral caBIG Open Source License, and in fact, several groups have downloaded code and customized it for their own local needs.

We recognize that meeting the challenge of creating robust and useful tools to support the rapidly evolving needs of the cancer research community requires an open and collaborative approach to software development.  The good news is that is that all of the software that has been developed through this program is already open source, under the non-viral caBIG Open Source License, and in fact, several groups have downloaded code and customized it for their own local needs.

But this is only a start.  The software release cycle for these tools is still managed by the government through government contractors, and there is no straightforward mechanism for community members to contribute enhancements and bug fixes back to a project.  Therefore, customizations that may be freely offered and broadly useful are not readily available to other groups. Moreover, organizations that have a locally customized version of the code who want to upgrade to the latest version cannot readily do so, and therefore will be out of synch with regular releases...