Our main product, the grit Scientific Data Management Platform, is about to change. We decided to stop selling the platform on a traditional software license and instead offer it free of charge as open source under a GPL license.
Let me share some of the reasoning behind this move.
Since the inception of grit42 in 2014 we have been fortunate enough to take part in some exciting EU-funded projects under IMI (Innovative Medicine Initiative) and IHI (Innovative Health Initiative) like COMBINE, ERA4TB, GNANOW, and ND4BB.
The participation in these programs has allowed us to work closely with many different kinds of users from both academia as well as pharma to develop cool new features and functionalities that benefit not only the programs they were developed for but also future grit users.
For example, we have had a long-term partnership with Fraunhofer ITMP in Hamburg on these data management projects, and on the ERA4TB project also with C-Path. They have helped us develop the platform and utilise it in the IMI/IHI projects. By going open source, we give them the ability to keep using the platform after the projects end.
Supporting important AMR research
Today, the grit platform plays an important role in projects like COMBINE and ERA4TB under AMR Accelerator, and a large amount of data and expertise have accumulated during the first years of these projects. However, sustainability is a big issue in these projects, and it is important to ensure that data can still be stored and used for further research in the future.
Research on AMR is incredibly important work, and we would like to make our contribution by making the grit platform available for future use.
Open source platforms make the discussion around sustainability a lot easier because the incentive for partners, academics, etc. to help improve the software naturally increases substantially if their efforts go into developing an open source platform that they will also be able to use themselves without having to pay a license fee.
Paying back to the open source community
If we take a look at the tool stack we have used to build grit, it is almost entirely…you guessed it: open source software.
We have benefited from the hours of hard work that the developers behind tools like React, Ruby on Rails, postgreSQL, and RDKit have put in.
So it also feels like the right thing to do to pay something back to the global open source community.
We have built on top of others' work and added the expertise that we have gained over the last 25 years of working with preclinical drug discovery data management and we have packaged it all up in a platform we believe will be of great value to many academics, small biotech companies, and other drug discovery organisations. Both in the AMR field but also in any other research field where the storage of compounds and their assay results is relevant.
Ready in Q1 2025
That said, we are still a software business - and we will still be selling some of our products on a license basis. But going forward it will be specific point solutions that are built on top of the open source grit platform, like gritAnimal which helps veterinarians and scientists plan, overview, and report on their animal studies.
The underlying scientific data management platform, however, will be free to use and develop for anyone interested. It’s not ready for download just yet. We are cleaning up the code and adding documentation in the platform, and our aim is to launch in Q1 2025.