Open Chemistry

Chemistry is not the most open field of scientific endeavor; in fact, as I began working more in the area (coming from a background in physics), I was surprised with the norms in the field. As a PhD student way back in 2003, I simply wanted to draw a 3D molecular structure on my operating system of choice (Linux), and be able to save an image for a paper/poster discussing my research. This proved to be nearly impossible, and in 2005 a group of like-minded researchers got together at a meeting of the American Chemical Society and formed an unorganization: The Blue Obelisk (named after their meeting place in San Diego)...

During my career I have spent a lot of time packaging other people's code, writing my own, and working on large software frameworks. I have seen projects that still haven't released a stable version, never quite hitting 1.0, while others made 1.0 releases within months of beginning development, and then quickly moving on to 2.0, 3.0, etc. There is quite a variance in these release cycles, and this coupled with maintaining large projects can make things difficult. I will go through some of the decisions we have faced in projects I have worked on and the pressures on the project. On the one extreme, users would like to have a stable API that never changes, with dependencies that don't specify a minimum version so that they can choose whatever version works best...