The Smallpox project wasn't run on World Community Grid. It was, I think, IBM's first involvement with humanitarian grid computing, and the project was run by United Devices. It was funded by the DoD, Microsoft and IBM. It was actually a very small project. It probably represented just a couple of days of supercomputer time.

Anyway, the project was a technical success, and served as a pilot for World Community Grid. But the way WCG was set up is significantly different to that project, and all the other grid projects out there. Public domain results, publically available peer reviewed papers, projects approved by the Advisory Board - WCG has extremely good humanitarian credentials.

Thank-you for your replies.

I have dug a little deeper and I have to say that I am not comforted.

1. The contract does *not* say that research will be released into the Public Domain, it says the results must be made freely available. These two are most definitely not the same. Freely available results may also be patented.

2. Of the two papers mentioned one (the Yeast Proteome) had one author who worked for Los Alamos Labs and was funded in part by the US Dept of Defense.

3. Why is this information so deeply buried? It should be much more easily available than this.

I will be withdrawing my support immediately.

Brett

I apologise, I skipped a piece and the contract says this:

"Results must be made available to the global research community by the sponsoring research organization and remain in the public domain."

However the involvement with the military remains completely unacceptable to me, so I have removed the software.

In that case do not expect your country or your allies to defend you or your family...what and idiot you are!