Open Technologies are Not a Passive Choice

Open technologies make our society a better place. What I mean by "open" is things that are not encumbered by patents, costly licenses, proprietary "know-how", or other rent-extracting dependencies that make it difficult for new people or organizations to start using them. Open technologies abound in the world of computing: the internet, email, and web pages are prime examples, as are most of the key libraries and software tools that support them. Similarly, the current revolutions going on with big data and machine learning are driven in part by the enabling power of the plethora of available powerful free and open software tools.

Open technologies, however, are not the natural state of the world. Some of that, of course, is due to simple human greed and competition. If you can technologically lock people into your platform, then you can make money off of them because the cost of switching is just too high or because you've established a de facto monopoly. I am convinced, however, that closed technologies are much more often simply the default position, and that we degrade toward that position whenever there is insufficient investment in keeping technologies open.

Open technologies in synthetic biology, as everywhere, are constantly being nibbled away at by antithetical market forces.

Consider the fact that making something an open technology is hard and takes a continual investment of resources:

• You have to document and explain things clearly, so that other people besides your team can use the technology.
• You have to bring together and maintain a sufficiently amicable community of people who find enough value in the technology to want to use it.
• People in the community will have different needs, so the technology is going to have to become more general and more complex, or else the community of users will fragment or shrink.
• Different implementations will have different mistakes and ambiguities, and if you don't identify them the technology will start to develop "dialects" and incompatibilities.
• As the technology evolves, or the world around it does, you have to adapt and update the whole mess, plus handle backward compatibility since older uses of the technology will still be around.

Notice that none of these steps are easy, and if anything goes wrong with any of them, the result is a less open technology. Keeping any technology open is thus a continual and ongoing struggle.

Now put that in a world of careers and money, and it all gets more complex. 

First, there's the straightforward problem of competition between open and proprietary technologies. There is always somebody who is interested in making money off of a proprietary alternative to an open technology, and if they've got more resources, they can often either "embrace, extend, and extinguish" or simply out-develop and out-market the open technology.

A more insidious problem, however, is passive choice. In our competitive global world, it doesn't matter whether you're in academia, in government, or in industry, in a big organization or a little one: most people who are doing something interesting are stretched for time and for resources. That means nobody is choosing whether to invest in an open technology or not. They're choosing whether to invest in an open technology or whether to invest in something else that's probably more urgent and more directly related to their career, their bottom line, etc. So for most people, it's always easy to say that the time is not right for them to invest their time, energy, money, credibility into an open technology, or even to just not pay attention at all.

Where does that leave us?

It's really easy to endorse open technologies and to say that you support them.

But the ongoing cost and challenges of maintaining open technologies also means this: if you aren't actively investing in open technologies, then you are actively choosing proprietary technologies over open technologies.

In the world of computing, it's been a long, hard fight, but open technologies are extremely firmly established in the general culture and there are many effective people and organizations that are actively investing to keep these technologies open.

In synthetic biology, the future is much less certain. On the one hand, there is a great and general enthusiasm for open communities, engineering ideas, and the vast possibilities of the field, which tends to support development of open technologies. On the other hand, there are a lot of broad intellectual property claims on fundamental technologies and a lot of money flowing into a lot of quickly growing companies, both of which tend to strongly promote the closure of technologies.

I would judge that within the next 5-10 years, we're going to be in a situation where either a) we are able to develop a strongly established foundation of open technologies and a supporting culture, as in the computing world, or b) the potential of the field becomes badly stunted by the difficulty of operating, where the cost of doing business is high and so are the barriers to entry for new players.

If you are in the field of synthetic biology, I believe that you need to think about where you stand on this, and make a decision about what you're going to do.  Are you going to actively invest in open technologies, or are you going to sit back and simply hope that the field does not get closed?

So if you are a synthetic biologist who agrees that open technologies are valuable, what should you do? Here are three simple ways to start investing:

• Figure out which of your proprietary things aren't actually important to keep proprietary, and make them available on open terms.
• Try out an open technology, and figure out how to make it work for your group. There will be bumps and problems, but when you face them go ask for help from the developers rather than dropping the project.
• Help develop an open technology. Any healthy community will welcome you with open arms.

Doing any of these will cost you, whether in money or opportunities.  Any benefits you get are more likely to be long-term than short-term.

I think it's worth it, though.

I spend most of my working life in the synthetic biology community. When I invest in open technologies, I'm investing in helping keep that community the sort of community where I want to spend my time.

And so I contribute to SBOL and to iGEM, we release and maintain software like TASBE Flow Analytics and TASBE Image Analytics, and I choose to use my time to go to meetings like the one where I just spent my last two days---the BioRoboost "Workshop on Synthetic Biology Standards and Standardisation."  I'm imperfect and the things I do and build are imperfect, but so far as I can tell, overall I am helping to make a useful contribution to our community.

What has your organization done for open technologies in synthetic biology lately?