The future of the Corporate Office Worker

Well, I know this is not a LIMS article but I just read an article that caused me to do a double take.  I know I am a bit out of touch with the smarmy corporate culture but my God, if this is the sort of stuff that is going on, I pray that the SPCA will come to the rescue of our fellow chickens (I mean office workers).

The article is in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Warming up to the Officeless Office”.  This reminds me of what has happened to the industrialization of chicken farming where you see thousands of chickens stuffed into a communal area.  The SPCA has attempted for years to come to the rescue of chickens, lets hope they can help out the poor Corporate office worker

Corporate-Friendly Open Source Licenses

I have been doing some research on the different types of Open Source licenses.  The following is a good posting that quickly summarizes the potential dangers of Open Source to corporations.  You just have to know the rules but as with all software, you need to live by the license agreement.  The funny thing is that GPL touts “freedom” but it is a rather restricted “freedom”.  it has all the ring of truth of the double speak/thought from the book 1984 by George Orwell.  Now I am all for Open Source in the corporate environment but you have to be careful, especially beware of AGPLv3.

What open source licenses are more corporate-friendly, i.e., they can be used in commercial products without the need to open source the commercial product?

I recommend the Apache License (specifically, version 2). It is not a “copy left” license and it addresses several matters that are important to established companies and their lawyers.

“Copy left” is the philosophy of the free software foundation requiring anything incorporating the licensed opens source code to also be licensed as open source. That philosophy is regarded as poison by established companies that want to keep their products proprietary.

Aside from not having “copy left” provisions, the Apache license specifically addresses the grant of rights from project contributors and it expressly addresses the fact that modern companies are typically made up for more than one legal entity (for example, a parent company and its subsidiaries). Most open source licenses don’t address these points.

Whatever license you choose, if you want your code to be “corporate friendly,” in the sense that you want it to be incorporated into commercial, non-open source products, it is essential that you avoid GPL and other “copy left” type licenses. While it would be best to consult with your own lawyer before investing time or money in a project for which this is an important factor, a quick shorthand for licenses that are and are not “copy left” can be found on the Free Software Foundation’s website. They identify which licenses they don’t find meet their standards as “copy left.” The ones FSF rejects are most likely the ones that will be corporate friendly in this sense.

(Although the question didn’t ask this, it is worth mentioning that, with very few exceptions, even GPL and other “copy left” type licenses are perfectly corporate friendly if they are only used internally by the commercial entities and not incorporated into their products.)

The above article is licensed as follows: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ and the source was provided by: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28530/corporate-friendly-open-source-licenses

Click here to read entire paper

Clouds are rapidly becoming an important platform for scientific applications. In this paper we describe our experiences running a scientific workflow application in the cloud.

The application was developed to process astronomy data released by the Kepler project, a NASA mission to search for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. This workflow was deployed across multiple clouds using the Pegasus Workflow
Management System. The clouds used include several sites within the FutureGrid, NERSC’s Magellan cloud, and Amazon EC2.

We describe how the application was  deployed, evaluate its performance executing in different clouds (based on Nimbus, Eucalyptus, and EC2), and discuss the challenges of deploying and executing workflows in a cloud environment. We also demonstrate how Pegasus was able to support sky computing by executing a single workflow across multiple cloud infrastructures simultaneously.

Posted by: John H. Jones

The LIMSforum is a user discussion group located on Linkedin.  The group has nearly 25,000 members, making it the largest and most popular user’s group devoted to all topics in LIMS and Laboratory Informatics.  If you are not already a member you can join it at www.limsforum.com.  The group is open to everyone and the members are very helpful in answering questions and holding useful discussions.

Here is a list of some of the most popular and useful discussions:

 

• Interactive Periodic Table – Almost Web 3.0! – this has 53 comments

• Will Cloud Computing make a commodity of LIMS & IT in general? – 9 comments

• I’m looking for flexible Reporting Solutions against ThermoFisher Sample Manager 9.x Any recommandations from this Group? – 9 comments

• LIMS in Brazil – 10 comments

• Achieving a fully integrated, data, information and Knowledge management environment is this really possible?? – 28 comments

• LIMS in manufacturing seems to me to have a negative trend – 13 comments

• Any suggestions for a LIMS to be used in manufacturing, QC, and packaging processes? Preferably compatible with common software and capabilities to communicate with other information systems. – 15 comments

• Do we need a new term to descibe systems that manage Laboratory Information? – 110 comments

• What are some trends that LIMS consultants are seeing in the Laboratory Informatics marketplace when it comes to the consulting business? – 11 comments

• Can anyone suggest a good compromise LIMS solution to manage analytical and bioanalytical processes? – 8 comments

• Data Visualization can be an important LIMS tool – 7 comments

 

There are tons of other great discussions going on in the group and there are a lot of job postings as well under the jobs tab.  The group is actively monitored and managed so that only valid, on-topic discussions take place in the discussion area while promotional postings are relegated to the “Promotions menu”.  This active, on-topic, non-commercial discussion group is what has made LIMSforum the largest and most popular discussion group within 2 years of it’s inception.

The LIMSforum was created on June 28, 2009 and as of the writing of this blog posting, it has 24,598 members and we are growing at about 1,500 new members per month.  Also there are a number of subgroups that are focused on things like Cloud Computing, Chromatography, Spectroscopy, Social Media, Healthcare, Life Sciences and more…

Be sure to check out all of these discussions and subgroups and feel free to post your own questions and invite others you know to join in.

Well, I guess history repeats itself.  It is amazing how people never learn from the past.  The standard excuse is: “it’s different this time”.  So here we go again with euphoria over dotcom junk.  Let’s look at some interesting facts.

The Linkedin IPO debuted with a reported market cap of $8.9 billion.  Read the article in USA Today.  Linkedin has both real and fictitious members that total just over 100 million accounts.  The only value that Linkedin has is their membership.  If there are no members, then there is no value.  No member, no advertisers, no way to make any money.  So I think we can all agree that the value of Linkedin comes from its number of members.

So this means that each member is worth $8.9B / 0.1B members = $89/member.  Here are some more interesting facts:  Linkedin made $15.4M in profits on $243.1M in revenues in 2010.  It will take 577 years of those sorts of profits to get your money back. Wow, what a great deal, and to top it off they plan on losing money this year, brilliant, I guess they plan to make it up on volume .

Now that I have made such a great pitch for Linkedin as an investment, would anyone like to buy my groups on Linkedin?  Remember it is all about membership accounts.  My LIMSforum group has 23,000 members and I don’t even make any money or lose any money.  So far I am doing better than Linkedin plans to do in 2011.  Using Linkedin valuations, the value of my group today is roughly 23,000 members x $89 per member = $2.047 Million.  Do I have any takers out there???  I take PayPal.  Nope, I think I hear crickets.