• How to make money from Open Source scientific software

    Dan (the original Jmol author) has an interesting blog series: How to make money from Open Source scientific software I, II and III. Three more blog items are in the planning. The deal with how to make money from open source scientific software. He wants to be able to skeptically review the software in his field, hence open source. But open source software development, at least in chemistry, needs funding, because there are too few people working on such software on a voluntary basis.
  • The PDB protein database uses Jmol

    The beta has been using Jmol as one of the viewers for ages already, but this beta is no longer: it’s the new interface for the PDB database.
  • Open source in drug discovery

    Geldenhuys et al. published an article in Drug Discovery Today titled Optimizing the use of open-source software applications in drug discovery (DOI:10.1016/S1359-6446(05)03692-5), and approached the review from a bench chemist point of view. Unfortunately, he discusses free, but closed source, program in one go.
  • More chemistry in KDE

    After Kalzium and kfile_chemical , KDE has now be extended with kparts for 3D structure and spectrum display: Kryomol . It is written in C++ and licensed GPL. It supports several chemistry formats, among which quantum chemical formats like Gaussian03, NwChem and ACES, and 3D structures as MDL molefile and XYZ.
  • Classpath 0.90 makes the Jmol application run

    A few days back, Classpath 0.90 was released, the first release after the 0.20 release. Earlier Classpath releases could run the rendering engine , but running the application failed so far .
  • Progress with CMLRSS plugin for Bioclipse

    With quite some help from Ola (thanx!), I made good progress with the CMLRSS plugin . The current result looks like:
  • Open source Jmol taking over the world

    Earlier I already reported that student text books were picking up Jmol as 3D viewer. Now, Nature Structural & Molecular Biology reports (DOI:10.1038/nsmb0206-93) that they picked it up too, using FirstGlance in Jmol (thanx Peter, for reporting this on the Blue Obelisk mailing list!). And, thanx Eric, for acknowledging the hard work of the Jmol developers.