Open Source in the Age of COVID-19

Several days ago, there were a number of new articles covering the attempted hack of American and British pharmaceutical firms by Russian and Chinese officials. Their aim was to steal the intellectual property of firms working on vaccines for the novel coronavirus, aka COVID-19. Let’s leave aside the fact that Western spies are meanwhile hacking into foreign networks and collecting their own data and intellectual property. For the sake of this argument, let’s concede that their spies are bad and ours are good because, oddly enough, that’s not what interests me here. It’s this whole notion of intellectual property related to a COVID-19 vaccine.

Now, I’d like to say that I have mixed feelings about this, but I’m pretty clear-headed on this one. Yes, I get it. Research is expensive and companies putting down millions of dollars in development are going to have to answer to their shareholders eventually. They are a business and business is there to make money. Got it.

Let’s also pretend, for the sake of this argument, that all of the companies involved in research don’t rely in any way on tax dollars, at the very least, subsidising their research.

Here’s the thing, though. We are in the middle of a global pandemic that has already claimed nearly 680,000 lives worldwide with more than 155,000 of those in the United States alone. People…