[wombatmobile]

> Why not make the software into a proprietary product? ... There’s such a race there that it’s hard to commercialize the software for the long term.” Schatz continues, “Plus our work is largely funded through government sponsored grants, so this is one of the important ways for us to give back to society.”

In some people's thoughts, making a better society is the first and most obvious thing to do with technology like this, not an accidental consequence of inconvenience. Fortunately, enough of those people are active in the world to make Main Street different to Wall Street, at least sometimes.

[klmr]

It’s a weird quote anyway since there is commercial, proprietary software for DNA sequence analysis. Just a few examples of companies in this space are Sentieon, Edico (acquired by Illumina) and Parabricks (acquired by Nvidia). And Michael knows this (they’re sufficiently well known, and his own research laid some of the earliest foundations that Parabricks would ultimately build upon) so I’m assuming the quote was taken out of context or he was talking specifically about his own lab.