Warren Lyford DeLano

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Warren Lyford DeLano is an outspoken advocate for the increased adoption of open source practices in the sciences, and especially drug discovery, where saving time and money directly translates into saving lives. In 2000, he launched the PyMOL open-source molecular viewer to help demonstrate the practical impact open source might have on discovery of new medicines. Since then, PyMOL has been widely adopted for molecular structure visualization within the pharmaceutical industry and at public sector research institutions.

In 2003, DeLano founded DeLano Scientific LLC to both commercialize PyMOL and to conduct an experiment in the "laboratory of the market" regarding the commercial viability of an open source software company. His as-yet-unproven hypothesis is that open source software is intrinsically optimal for science, and that scientific software companies which provide open source solutions will, through free market competition, eventually displace companies that favor proprietary solutions. However, the recent strong growth of proprietary scientific software companies such as OpenEye Scientific Software, SciTegic, and ChemAxon concurrent with PyMOL's emergence would seem to refute his hypothesis, at least over the near-term. Open-source may ultimately prove instead to complement or invigorate rather than obviate proprietary software.

Public Quotes

"Lack of access to effective software continues to be a major hindrance to scientific progress and therapeutic discovery. For the benefit of all society, we need to pursue new and complementary approaches to the creation and dissemination of scientific software." from the DeLano Scientific LLC about page.

"The only way to publish software in a scientifically robust manner is to share source code, and that means publishing via the internet in an open-access/open-source fashion." posted to the Computational Chemistry List on October 12, 2005.

"To the pharmaceutical manager, tasked with delivery of robust information systems, open source is simply a way to gain increased flexibility and lower upfront costs in exchange for assuming greater internal responsibility over acquired software." from Drug Discovery Today v. 10, p. 213, 2005.

Other Points of View

"Open-source will never achieve ubiquity. There are environments in which it simply does not flourish." Matt T. Stahl, S.V.P., OpenEye Scientific Software, from Drug Discovery Today v. 10, p. 219, 2005.

"Why 'Free Software' is better than 'Open Source' " Richard Stallman, Full Article

"Technology innovation has happened much, much more from commercial software developers than from open source." Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, at the Worldwide Partner Conference, July 2004.

"I’ve been pounding the table here for a year or so saying there’s no free lunch, and there is going to be a day of reckoning for every company that thinks they are going to try and sell a free model." Darl McBride president and CEO of the SCO Group from the Salt Lake City Weekly, January 22, 2004.

Biography

• 1972 Born in Pennsylvania.
• 1975 Moves to Palo Alto, California.
• 1979 Learns to hack on a TRS-80 Model I.
• 1985 Shifts to hacking on an Apple Macintosh 512K.
• 1990 Graduates high school.
• 1993 Graduates Yale University with B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry.
• 1995 Joins the department of Protein engineering at Genentech, Inc.
• 1998 Joins in the launch of Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
• 1999 Graduates University of California, San Francisco, with Ph.D. in Biophysics.
• 2000 Published thesis research in Science Magazine v. 287, p. 1279.
• 2000 Releases PyMOL to the Internet.
• 2003 Launches DeLano Scientific LLC.