{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1", "title": "chem-bla-ics", "description": "Chemblaics (pronounced chem-bla-ics) is the science that uses open science and computers to solve problems in chemistry, biochemistry and related fields.", "home_page_url": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/", "feed_url": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/2010/01/15/warren-delano-and-future-of-pymol.json", "icon": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/assets/images/chem-bla-ics_logo.png", "language": "en", "authors": [ { "name": "Egon Willighagen", "url": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-0286", "_orcid": "0000-0001-7542-0286" } ], "items": [ { "id": "https://doi.org/10.59350/dskgb-hdz03", "url": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/2010/01/15/warren-delano-and-future-of-pymol.html", "title": "Warren DeLano and the future of PyMOL", "content_html": "

This blog is old and new news. The old news is that Warren passed away at the\nend of last year, after having successfully shown how OpenSource cheminformatics (and/or bioinformatics) software can be developed in a commercial setting\n(DeLano Scientific), and PyMol was a huge success. Warren had a SourceForge account\n(wdelano) for almost 10 years:

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I had not blogged about it before as the news hit me hard. Surely, Warren knew a lot of people and I only was only one of many, but Warren’s memory sticked well.\nI know Warren from the Jmol project, where we talked in the past of coming to an Open Specification for exchanging scenes between\nJmol and PyMol. Around the end of my PhD contract we even briefly, but seriously, explored doing a post-doc in his group.

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Anyway, lot’s of people wrote up blogs (in arbitrary order: Rich ,\nP212121, MacResearch,\nJörg, MMB,\nShirley, Derek,\nWavefunction, Dan,\nBarry, and probably many more).\nThey have set up a memorial fund which will focus on promoting the Open Source ideas of Warren, including\nan Award.

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Schrödinger

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Yesterday, I was pinged about\nSchrödinger acquiring PyMol. The press release is, as usual, short on details, but those have\nbecome clearer during the day. Schrödinger is not new to Open Source cheminformatics, and has an\nproduct based on KNIME, which is now GPL, but also has a proprietary license\nfor those who wish to license so.

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But, unless I missed any other Open Source (-oriented) product, the acquisition of PyMol significantly changes the game for them:\nPyMol is a major Open Source product, bigger than KNIME at the moment, I’d guess. My immediate response to the acquisition is whether\nthey acquired copyrights, and they did, according to this commit:

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This is important as it puts Schrödinger in charge of license changes. Fortunately, they seem rather serious about the Open Source thing, and\nhired an active PyMol developer (Jason), and kept the existing Open Source license:

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Therefore, congratulations to Schrödinger for getting seriously into the Open Source community, making them the next\nDr Who of PyMol, and\ncongratulations to the family of Warren in ensuring continued development of the PyMol project! It’s hearth-warming to see that despite\nthe bad times they are going through, and all they options they had with the PyMol code base, they find time for and strength in\nsupporting Warren’s ideas about the future of cheminformatics. My thoughts are with them!

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References

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Apodaca, R. (2009). Warren DeLano. In Front Matter. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.59350/rj9fv-7mf71 CrossRef Scholia
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", "summary": "This blog is old and new news. The old news is that Warren passed away at the end of last year, after having successfully shown how OpenSource cheminformatics (and/or bioinformatics) software can be developed in a commercial setting (DeLano Scientific), and PyMol was a huge success. Warren had a SourceForge account (wdelano) for almost 10 years:", "image": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/assets/images/pymol2.png", "date_published": "2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2026-08-16T00:00:00+00:00", "tags": ["odosos","chemistry"], "_references": [ { "url": "https://doi.org/10.59350/rj9fv-7mf71", "doi": "10.59350/rj9fv-7mf71" } ], "authors": [ { "name": "Egon Willighagen", "url": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-0286" } ] } ] }