[Open-bio-l] Open Source Services

[Peter Cock]

Hi Spencer,

Certainly food for thought... but I'm not sure what practically OBF, or
anyone else outside the original project team might do in this
specific instance.

Assuming some service was running on open source code, and the underlying
data was openly licenced, then in theory a team could potentially setup and
host a final snapshot of a deprecated service. But would that actually be
enough use to justify that effort (and the long term server costs -
including security maintenance)?

Rather, I think building services with federation or replication built in
from the start makes more sense - so there might be some mileage in
coordinating efforts and best practices. Perhaps encouraging the release of
virtual machines or images for re-runnable web-services (Docker,
Singularity, etc)? Also, some journals are very active in this area
(GigaScience).

Peter

On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 10:49 PM Spencer Bliven <spencer.bliven at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hey OBF,
>
> The RCSB is currently phasing out some old web services, some of which
> BioJava depends on (see https://github.com/biojava/biojava/pull/882 for
> specifics). This got me thinking about how we don't really have good open
> source models for web services. Server source is usually closed, and may
> depend on specific databases. APIs may be documented, but there are usually
> specifics that you can only figure out from a running system. As a result,
> if a service shuts down there's not much that users of that service can do
> about it.
>
> Are there any organizations interested in the continuity of
> Bioinformatics-related web services? If not, would this potentially fall
> under OBF's mission? If not direct hosting, maybe coordinating efforts or
> pest practices?
>
> Cheers,
> -Spencer
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