Fold for Covid is fine - helping someone else grow rich isn't

Greetings!

I did a lot of reading about the Fold for Covid - and, on the surface, it sounds like a worthy idea.

On further examination, I find several disturbing difficulties:

  1. The research itself is “closed source”.
    a. If I want to follow any of these links to the referenced documentation, it’s all on some subscription site that requires an expensive subscription - obviously for the elite, not us slimy commoners.

  2. What I could find mentioned that this research was covered/potentially covered by patents, owned in part by the researchers. While that, in itself, isn’t bad, (researchers owning patents) - I have difficulty justifying use of my systems, my bandwidth, and my internet allocations, to help someone else make millions - and then charge me insane prices for essential medicine like the Epi-pen.

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Interesting.
Would you care to provide us links to where you found that information so we could all see for ourselves?

Thanks.

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Me too. I’d like to see those links as I am very concerned by helping projects that don’t really help!

For the moment, I am participating in this project, though.

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Thanks for your comments and questions!

On the research side you can find some of the results being opened here:

However if you don’t feel comfortable with these researchs feel free to do not take part on the fold for covid project.

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@mpous

I do feel ok about participating in this project. In fact I am purchasing some more raspberry pi’s to run. I was just wondering where @jharris1993 got the so called information?

I have absolutely no problem with open source being used for profit, even if I personally do not do that since I do not need to sell my work to survive.

I have been a long time supporter of Balena, by the way - even though I try to run a nearly 100% free as in speech platform (I do know that raspberry pi is not free in the FSF sense)

Anyway, I was just trying to get genuine information, and not just conspiracy theory craziness, out of the person who started this thread :wink:

Thanks Marc, for taking the time to reply!
Yours faithfully,
G

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Hi G, I actually think that Marc’s comment may have been directed to the OP. :slight_smile:

And, thank you for your support and lending a hand by adding more devices!

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Thank you @gratefulfrog

Let us know if we can help you with anything else :slight_smile:

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Sorry for the delay, here in Russia we’ve been under the equivalent of “house arrest” due to the strict quarantine. Our granddaughters were visiting us for their spring break when all this happened so my wife and I have been stuck helping them get set up for their on-line classes and such.

Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, :wink: and that’s the time my HP inkjet printer decided to roll over and die, leaving a puddle of ink in it’s wake… I finally fixed that and my computer’s monitor decided to snap off at the base hinge… Now I’m trying to, (carefully), glue the base of my computer’s monitor back together!

Just as soon as I get time to breathe, I’ll dig up and post those links!