As the results of the folding go into the public domain, why keep the code of fold.it closed?
At the moment there are a lot of open issues on the bug tracker and the developer team doesn't seem to have enough manpower for all of them.
Making fold.it open source might help with the manpower problem.
foldit code will eventually be shared for all non-profit purposes. we expect the game to evolve out of the beta first. also, we have to figure out how to share the code, without allowing people to use their own clients, and cheat by reporting modified scores.
That sounds great.
If I understand the system right at the moment client have to upload the final version of the protein anyway to the server to report their score.
The server could recalculate the score to be sure. People will probably also be able to hack enough into fold.it to change the score that gets reported without having the source code.
Having a replay like function where everyone can look at all action that were taken to get to the final score would also help to catch cheaters.
Thinking closed source is a protection against hacking or cheating is a big mistake. You can just delay them (and not very much if your software is really interesting to hack) by closing the source.
The most important is to improve the quality of the code of Foldit, and quality could be greatly improved if more programmers could contribute to the debugging or development.
That's why open source could be very interesting.
Don't only open the source, give the right to reuse it too (with AGPL for example)
Open-source? Yes, yes and YES!
I very want to have it this way.
There are many users here, wo have the technical know-how to fix bugs and make improvements.
Often, minor bugs are reported here, who could be removed quickly, but are not, because of the lack of manpower (and time?).
So, by open-source you could easily get more people helping you (people living at other time-zones), and I trust everyone here, that he has in his mind, that the way to solutions are the most important point of the game, and not the score.
Okay, safety and cheating issues is a point, but as the users ChristianK and serval2412 said before, there IS a way to prevent cheating.
regards with best wishes,
Alex
ChristianK:
Your idea to submit not only the solution but also the moves towards it is very good!
The game should not only upload the solution, but the UNDO-info, where the states are already stored.
This brings me to the suggestion that the game in general should not only store the current state, but also the undo-content, because so you can save many states in one file, which would increase file size, but reduce file quantity, which would also make group-sharing solutions more lucid.
Foldit relies substantially on open source packages such as, Boost, boinc, glut, libircclient, etc.
And yet, another year has passed, and the Foldit source remains closed.
:-(
I have good news on this front. As was out intention since the inception of this project, UW will issue a free license for all non-commercial uses of Foldit. It will be available both as a standalone interface that can be linked with other biochemistry software, and as an extra feature for the Rosetta protein structure code available through the long established Rosetta Commons. Commercial licenses Foldit interface will also be available for an annual fee.
Some of the difficulties of pushing this through stemmed from the fact that Rosetta biochemistry code included with Foldit already has a distribution protocol that we had to adhere to.
Marking the status as DONE.
Here is the link to the Rosetta Commons for those interested: http://www.rosettacommons.org/
That's some nice news :)