@ Dave Bell:

My guess was that the current project is fairly fundamental. I missed the open publication requirement. That's a good start. However, patents are also considered open publications.

As a scientist, I do understand that subsequent research may lead to patents, and am not worried about that. That's simply the progress of sience.

I was worried though that some findings that might be patentable and most institutions these days are fairly agressive in that, which is logical with all the budgetary challenges they face, when greedy post-docs like me want better and better pay

However, I'd like to see that the world grid not only requires open publication of the results, but also explicitely says something about not patenting data retrieved from the grid. It may not be neccesary for the current project, but it might be for future projects. I like the idealism of sharing unused CPU time, but I would also very much like to see good and strong garantees that the acquired knowledge is freely available to the public once it's retrieved.

On the whole, I would like to see more information about the science and what happens with the results. I realize that this is challenging since many participants are not scientists, but I believe many are.

@ Dave: don't worry too much about keeping on board, I will. It's just that I would like to make sure that all data is as accessable for everyone as participation is. The file you provided seems to make that very clear. That is reassuring.

The smallpox example is a good example of what I am aiming at. It is good that the grid is used to identify 45 smallpox treament candidates. Presumably, there is only one (maybe two or three) that qualify to be transformed to a decent medicine.

My point is that if a pharmceutical company takes the 45 and figures out which one is the best one, it should be made sure that that company does not block of testing of that specific drug by others.

I realize that narrowing down from 45 to 1 costs (a lot of) money and do not want to deprive a company from earning that investment back.

However, the one drug should in no way become completely blocked of to others, since without the initial calculation from infinite to 45, the company would have never been able to start their research.

I am making this point since I have a bad experience with a (chemical) product that was (rightfully) protected by a patent. My group found a totally new application for this product, but the patent holder would only sell us the product under the condition that ALL possible inventions and applications would be in THEIR FULL OWNERSHIP, i.e. we could not patent our application. Not even with shared ownership, which seemed reasonable to us (after all, we did not mind their patent on their initial product).

In the end we published the application, but unfortunately, this (handy) application will never become widespread, since the manufacturer simply will not even allow 'our' application on a wide spread scale. They'll only sell one unit per customer, and assume that if you need more, you've found something patentable and they want all profit from that.

In the end, I don't care much about the money (it woudn't have been that much anyway), but it does frustrate me that the science community can not benefit from this handy trick we figured out.

I would not like to see that research based on results from the grid get 'grid locked' (sorry for the bad word joke) by obnoxious companies that take the initial grid work for granted or "free imput".

I realize this is difficult to arrange, but that's what lawyers are for

@ Dave:

Thanks for the invite, but I will politely decline. I have enough other sources of distraction on the web to keep me too busy.

I'll keep an occasional eye on the fora here, but they seem to be mostly technical and quite frankly, I couldn't care less. I care a bit about the idealism of the shared grid, but am very happy doing my thing on my own. Maybe I'll start my own little group one day.

The only technical improvement I want in the grid is a CPU usage cap to reduce the zooming of the fan in my poor little overheating labtop. It seems more people have asked for this, so I guess it'll show up one day.