What Is the Price of Open-Source Software?

The notion that all scientific software should be open-source and free has been actively promoted in recent years, mostly from the top down via mandates from funding agencies1 but occasionally from the bottom up, as exemplified by a recent Viewpoint in this journal.2 A commonly articulated rationale is that the results of scientific research funded by government grants should be free for society and that the scientific community benefits from free access. The purpose of this Viewpoint is to examine the consequences of these opinions. What Is Scientif ic Sof tware? Modern computational chemistry software is an extremely complex product based on advanced scientific ideas (models and theories) and sophisticated algorithms that transform these ideas from equations into useful tools. The development of practical software that can be used by nonexperts to solve contemporary research problem