PyMOL Industrial Consortium

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(Consortium hosted here at pymol.com. The PyMOL Product & Open-Source Project are at pymol.org)

The PyMOL Industrial Consortium is being formalized publicly in 2009 in response to specific recurrent requests from core customers for major platform enhancements in the areas of modeling, integration, usability, documentation, deployment, interoperability, and collaboration.

While DeLano Scientific LLC continues to independently develop PyMOL at the modest but steady pace permitted by our low-cost/high-efficiency business model (maintenance & support services on top of open-source), an influential group of leading industrial customers have come together to express pressing needs-in-common coupled with a mutual willingness to fund rapid development of the required capabilities -- capabilities extending well beyond what we ourselves could hope to implement with present means and in reasonable time.

Though sponsored development projects have shaped our software for years, we have now taken the additional step of formalizing the PyMOL Industrial Consortium as a managed resource channel through which project-specific funds are aggregated from participating customers and then applied to meet precise customer-driven development goals. Much of this work is being accomplished through enlistment of qualified independent contractors working under the coordination of DeLano Scientific LLC with regular consultation of Consortium members who are underwriting each project.

In return for their funding and participation, PyMOL Consortium members are given exclusive access to full consortium-developed capabilities for appropriate time periods, before they are made available to the broader PyMOL customer base (after 1-3 years), and when feasible, to the PyMOL open-source community (after 3-6 years).

The ambitious nature of the PyMOL Consortium's development goals will require customer participants to set aside specific funds in their annual corporate budgets. Therefore, we are asking all likely participants to please reserve a "line item" entry of 25k USD per project in their annual software technology budgets for each project they wish to participate in.

Entities which cannot commit such funding but do wish to support the initiative may join as a Limited Members in order access past year Consortium Deliverables for a lesser contribution to the discretionary fund. However such members may not participate in or benefit from the current year's projects.

Likely and/or Confirmed Consortium Projects for 2009:

• AxPyMOL (PyMOL as an ActiveX control for use inside PowerPoint and Internet Explorer)

• WebPyMOL (PyMOL web services interfaces for "Web 2.0" development)

• Modeling (interactive realtime modeling of ligands, proteins, and possibly nucleic acids)

• CoPyMOL (PyMOL remote collaboration and synchronization)

Other Past, Potential, and Future Consortium Projects:

• JPyMol and JyMol (PyMOL graphics inside a JNI-based Java component, with or without Python)

• CMol, CPyMol, QtMol, QtPyMol, WxMol, WxPyMol, etc. (as above, but wrapped under your preferred toolkit).

• Molcraft™ (an industrialized PyMOL platform with a modern look & feel and more advanced interfaces)

• NetMol™ (an open data model for interchange of molecular structures and associated visualizations)

• Jenarix™ (a practical object-flow abstraction for development of concurrent software systems)

For additional information about the PyMOL Consortium, please contact: warren@delsci.com.
(inquiries from potential contractors are welcome too!).

Cheers,
Warren L. DeLano, Ph.D.
Founder & Principal
DeLano Scientific LLC