Comment by pfisherman

Key question is the license they attach to model and weights. I have been seeing an increasing amount of releases in this space under non-commercial licenses.

I think companies in the space should either totally open source or not publish at all.

I can see publishing like this as achieving one (or more) of a several objectives:

1. Marketing software to for sales / licensing

2. Marketing startup to investors

3. Crowdsourcing use cases or product features from academia

Now here are the problems with those:

1. Selling software (exclusively) to drug companies is a terrible business model. Very low ceiling there. You can make more from one drug.

2. Indicates company focus is producing models and not drugs. See point one.

3. Computational labs want to release open source, so not viable to build on restricted tooling. Experimental labs may just be using to algo-wash prior hypotheses / biases.

Now weigh against disadvantage of letting competitors know what you are working on, how far you have progressed, as well as your methods.