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Comment by simonster | Hacker News Reader

How does your product compare with http://www.openscienceframework.org/? As a scientist, I'm inclined to trust OSF more, since it's run by other scientists, fully open source, and doesn't need to make a profit. At the moment, OSF seems more focused on tools to facilitate collaboration and less focused on replicating functionality currently available on GitHub, although it sounds like they use git as a backend and eventually plan to implement functionality similar to what Banyan (and GitHub) currently provide.

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Hi Simonster, Thats a great question & a valid concern considering the acquisitions of tools like Mendeley [1]. We are equally focused on tools for collaboration & reproducibility, but our efforts the past few months have been focused on building an MVP.

With Banyan, your data will always be open & you're free to take it with you anywhere. If you want to move your repos to github/bitbucket/another service, you're easily able to do so

[1] - http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/08/confirmed-elsevier-has-boug...

I'm a recovering PhD. OSF looks pretty cool.

By the way OSF costs money if it is done by scientists. Those scientists get paid by someone. They spent shit ton of money (in form of salaries + time) building it + publishing it. Science works on government grants, i.e. taxpayer money. It is actually a fairly profitable industry, and NIH grants are the biggest contributor to capital expenditure of US Research Universities. The 55% overhead coming out of each grant is basically the "profit margin". Calling something by a different name doesn't make it so. Your github profile says you're at MIT, around Cambridge. So am I. What do you think pays for all the shiny buildings around Kendall? It's not just philanthropy.

Sure, OSF costs money, but VC-funded startups are under pressure to monetize their customer bases, whereas grant-funded projects just need to make something useful enough to justify continued investment. There's the obvious risk is that a VC-funded company will make its money off of selling your private information. (I don't think this is very likely, but I trust Brian Nosek a lot more than I trust most startups.) The bigger issue is that VC-funded companies need to keep a tight leash on their product, whereas grant-funded projects are free to grow in a distributed fashion. While ordinary people are happy to live within the limits of their software, scientists like to explore new frontiers, and it sucks when our software can't take us there. This is why I firmly believe that software (and preferably hardware) that scientists use to do science needs to be open source.

I'm not sure I'd call grant income that gets reinvested in infrastructure and educational expenditures "profit." Not only do private corporations buy shiny buildings, but they also have a legal obligation to make as much money for their shareholders as they possibly can. MIT doesn't.

While I can agree with the spirit of your message, OTOH...

> Not only do private corporations buy shiny buildings, but they also have a legal obligation to make as much money for their shareholders as they possibly can.

This seems to be a popular belief, but it's simply not true. Private companies have no legal requirement to make profits or pay dividends. Even public companies, do not have to by law, maximize profits ("make as much money").[1] Corporate officers do of course, have an obligation to act in the best interests of the company, and have maintain certain fiduciary duties.

[1] http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-com...

Sorry, you're right, there is no direct legal obligation to make money. However, investors in startups frequently have a large degree of control over the direction of the company, and often care more about the bottom line than any broader mission to change the world. See e.g. Jason Hoyt's blog post on Mendeley: http://enjoythedisruption.com/post/47527556151/my-thoughts-o...

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