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Licence discussion
We want to build the best variant database in the world, work in the open, and keep pushing technology forward.
Instead of being fully open source, we restrict non-research use to fund development, and improve what's available to research for free.
In our opinion the market for bioinformatics software has split into small open source tools and large proprietary ones.
Open source tools are free and flexible, but due to how science is funded, are usually smaller in scope and sometimes abandoned once a paper is published or key personnel leave a lab.
Commercial solutions are usually much larger in scope, high quality, and easy to use. But as proprietary software, any knowledge and techniques developed are not shared with the community, users are unable to extend them, and cash poor researchers are often not able to afford them.
As labs place many years worth of data into a variant database, moving off that system becomes more and more difficult. Commercial vendors may not always provide an easy way to export the lab's curation effort out of the system so they can move.
Many commerical products don't allow, or can't facilitate, users running queries on their own database. This limits the amount of data mining a lab is able to do, and the kinds of research questions that can be asked.
VariantGrid is licenced under the Business Source License
We allow free research use, and trial/evaluation, but production commercial users need a licence. 4 years after a commit, that code reverts to the GNU Affero General Public License v3. See the BSL FAQ - why the BSL?
Please contact us if you are unsure whether you meet the free / academic research criteria.
- Extensibility - full access to source code, write your own tools or features and send us pull requests
- Mine your own data - full access to the SQL database
- High privacy and security - Audit the code, install it on your own private server yourself
- No lock-in. After 4 years, manage your system yourself, or pay someone other than us to do so.
- Fund the development of free research tools
We are interested in partnering with biomedical companies to distribute and/or provide commercial support to customers (especially outside of Australia)
If you're interested in extracting some code out into a library or another (non-competing) project, let us know and we may be able to extract & re-licence it.