[Openchemistry-developers] MolView for GSoC 2017

Sat Apr 1 11:08:03 EDT 2017

Dear Herman,

We certainly understand your interest in using GSoC to re-start MolView - that's one of the goals of Google in running GSoC is to foster open source development. And we have an interest in the broader scope of open source chemistry. (A good browser-based editor would be a very nice tool.)

The problem is that GSoC is a very specific program from Google. To be honest, we do not set up the rules or even pick student projects. We *recommend* student proposals to Google, who ultimately makes the final decision. Beyond questions on the license, there *must* be a specific mentor for a project. While we encourage students to propose new projects, we still have to find a good fit with a mentor.

We have no mentors familiar with your code, nor with Dart.

If you wanted to propose a project for browser-based 3D editing using 3Dmol.js or Avogadro, that's a completely different thing - we have mentors that can serve.

But even a truly outstanding proposal without a mentor will not be selected by Google. And it's not just one mentor - Google wants to see an organization like OpenChemistry have a pool of ~2x mentors as students (e.g., mentors travel and take vacations too).

I haven't looked - does Dart have a summer program? I think you can propose "unattached" projects through a catch-all Google organization too.

Best regards,
-Geoff

> On Apr 1, 2017, at 10:15 AM, Herman Bergwerf <hermanbergwerf at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Marcus,
> 
> Although changing the license is not the primary problem for me, there are indeed no other people involved in this project for a role as mentor. There is another project that is currently consuming my time and when a friend gave me a heads up about GSoC I thought it might be a way to start MolView development again, not so much as it turns out.
> 
> Thanks for your response anyway, and good luck with GSoC.
> 
> Regards,
> Herman Bergwerf
> 
> Op za 1 apr. 2017 om 15:48 schreef Marcus D. Hanwell <marcus.hanwell at kitware.com <mailto:marcus.hanwell at kitware.com>>:
> Hi Herman,
> 
> I don't see a good fit here for a few reasons, first and foremost being that a student cannot mentor themselves. The Open Chemistry organization is formed around a number of projects where we know and have worked with the projects/mentors for quite a few years (in loose online forms in some cases, but still). This enables us to build up a level of trust, and enough overlap such that we have good confidence that we can offer the good experience for the students and mentors.
> 
> Finally, we favor permissive, OSI-approved licenses in general that encourage reuse in the wider context. While there are some exceptions for historic reasons I think as a group that is the direction we (and certainly I) would like to follow. The AGPL is very much in the opposite direction, which is your project's choice but I don't feel it is well aligned with our organization.
> 
> I wish you well in your endeavors to develop MolView, but as stated I don't see a good fit. Even if there were we decided on included projects in the organization proposal period, were selected on our proposal, and intend to offer the projects with the mentor group originally proposed.
> 
> Yours sincerely,
> 
> Marcus
> --
> Marcus D. Hanwell, Ph.D.
> Technical Leader, Kitware Inc.
> (518) 881-4937 <tel:(518)%20881-4937>
> On Sat, Apr 1, 2017 at 9:06 AM, Herman Bergwerf <hermanbergwerf at gmail.com <mailto:hermanbergwerf at gmail.com>> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am Herman Bergwerf, developer of http://molview.org <http://molview.org/>. I have a fairly simple question. Would it be possible to sign up my development on molview.org <http://molview.org/> for GSoC under the Open Chemistry organization?
> 
> I developed MolView in highschool and have been looking into improving it. Last year I did a failed attempt at building an architecture from scratch. Basically I started of a little too enthusiastic and wrote a completely modular, message based frontend architecture that was intended to be super modular. But after almost a year of working on this I decided I was going nuts and discarded it. However a lot is to be done. I almost get emails weekly about people enthusiastic about MolView or requesting new features. An old roadmap of ideas is here: https://github.com/molview/molview-1st-gen/wiki/Roadmap <https://github.com/molview/molview-1st-gen/wiki/Roadmap>. I created mockups for a new, even more immersive user interface more than a year ago (http://blog.molview.org/posts/2015/07/23/material-design/ <http://blog.molview.org/posts/2015/07/23/material-design/>). I abandoned development on MolView almost a year ago in favor of working on some other projects (also OSS). However I still retain interest in MolView. It is open source (AGPL) and so far developed on 0$ funding (except for my own funding to pay for hosting, and I hate ads so never added them). In the past 3/4 years MolView has been visited over 400.000 times by more than 230.000 unique users. In the past years I developed an interest in the Dart language. I would love to rebuild MolView from scratch in Dart, implementing the new user interface (as shown in the mockups), along with a set of new features (more embedding options, OBJ export for 3D printing, DNA sequence viewer, etc.), and drastically improving the code (compared to now I was a very bad coder back in highschool ;-D).
> 
> I know MolView is not officially a open chemistry project (I'm not sure how the organization works), but it would be really awesome if I can work on MolView this summer while also making some money. If this is possible I can write a proposal with a list of technologies, the basic architecture, and an initial set of features.
> 
> Thanks!
> Herman Bergwerf
> 
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