i don't like the idea much.

everybody knows about 'non-profit' businesses that have some well-paid people running them!

also, i think eventually some private company will have to test and make these new drugs at their own expense, hoping to recover some profit later. is that correct?

Im unsure of what this actually means. Does this mean a part of the organization is profit driven? What does this mean for participants? Each member couldn't be paid a dividend, which means that profits must be returned to the organization I guess. If this happens, what would the money used for and who decides?

I think as a non-profit organization the aims and goals are clear and not muddied by greedy personal motivations, or at least those greedy personal motivations are forcibly restrained in this system.
As it is, the limit of satisfaction is only restrained by the amount of personal effort put in and the sense of achievement is a connected one, almost communal, made in connection with others and in accordance with positive group aims.

We are unable to control what happens to those ideals once the research is done and unfortunately some research is used for less than ideal purposes, and I fear that with even partial corporatization, there would be a loss of momentum in this area.

I think I am echoing previous sentiments here, what do others think?

No No No, lets stay completely free of commercial taint! When I tell people about grid computing, and WCG inparticular, this is the aspect that most impresses people.

As Didactylos points out, public domain results also means that new drugs are less likely to be heavily patented by drug companies. This increases the chance of getting cheaper generic drugs.

I will always crunch for WCG if it stays as it is. But using BOINC, I am always on the lookout for other worthy projects. I recently did a search for a cancer research project. I found one, but it was one of the ones with a commercial angle, all about crunching for commercial interests in return for earning credit to buy more computing time from supercomputers (or something like that). It was so convoluted and complicated that I lost interest immediately, asside from considering whether or not it was a worthy idea!

Another project that I did find interesting was "malariacontrol.net". I understand that this one narrowly missed an assosciation with WCG. This is a shame, because it is very worthy (in my view) and not-for-profit structure. It is currently in its Beta test phase, so is not yet open for mass use. I will crunch for this (in addition to WCG) when it opens. Pity we cannot include them in WCG - do any WCG folk know if there are any plans for this in the future???

Hi NoMercy,
If you read through Past Projects at Distributed Computing ( http://distributedcomputing.info/past.html ) I think that you will find several distributed computer projects similar to what you suggest. My impression is that they were failures.

I think that this happened due to 2 main causes:
1) There is no established market for distributed computed of this type. A corporation with many personal computers, work stations and servers could rent computer time on a well-managed tightly coupled network cluster. Until the supply of corporations with spare computer capacity is depleted, volunteer grids like ours are just not commercially competitive.
2) Almost nobody wants to volunteer their computer for anything commercial. We are paid by feeling good about what we are doing for free. As soon as we start computing profit and loss, even if all profit is invested in charitable works, our feeling of altruism vanishes.

It is an interesting idea, but I think that it would go over like a lead balloon.

Lawrence