Skyline Licence Agreement oktawia borkowska  2023-03-27 23:58
 

I work within a commercial sector for a large biopharmaceutical CDMO company and I finally have a project where I could utilise Skyline software. I would like to set up a PRM method within my lab for a project I am working on.

I would like to check with Skyline if there are any legal restrictions on the use of the software from a commercial or industry perspective? Are you aware if the software is being used in the pharmaceutical industry at all?

Additionally our IT and legal departments have the following questions:
• How long does it take Skyline to fix a bug?
• What training do Skyline provide?
• Do Skyline have an applicable enterprise level Software License and Services Agreement that includes key topics such as Confidentiality, Data / Information Security (e.g. there is no known illicit Code in the software), Intellectual Property, Compliance with Anti-Corruption Laws, applicable Warranties / Indemnification etc.

Many thanks for your help.
Oktawia
 
 
Brendan MacLean responded:  2023-04-06 09:42

Hi Oktawia,
While I am not qualified to give legal advice, we tried hard to make the Skyline software license as open as possible while still relying on DLLs from the instrument vendors. It its first 2-3 years of existence, Mike and I spent a lot of time working with the instrument vendors and UW Tech Transfer to word their license agreements such that the only commercial restriction we know of impacts any attempt to redistribute the instrument vendor DLLs for your own commercial gain. Our goal was to allow anyone to USE them freely for any purpose, even for commercial gain. You just can't resell them without seeking a different license agreement from the instrument vendors. The Mascot Parser and ALGLIB DLLs can also be used, but not resold.

The full terms are here:

https://skyline.ms/wiki/home/software/Skyline/page.view?name=LicenseAgreement

Otherwise, we distribute our own work under one of the more industry-friendly open-source licenses, Apache 2.0.

To answer your questions:

  • Are you aware if the software is being used in the pharmaceutical industry at all?
    • Yes, we know of many commercial users and have several key partners in biopharmaceuticals.
  • How long does it take Skyline to fix a bug?
    • Usually very quickly, if you are willing to accept the fix in our beta release (Skyline-daily) or a private build.
    • Otherwise, we have been quite successful at making major releases every 6-8 months and patch releases as needed to fix critical issues.
  • What training do Skyline provide?
    • Multiple week-long in-person training workshops every year.
    • One online training workshop each fall.
    • Extensive tutorial documentation and video training content.
  • Does Skyline have an applicable enterprise-level Software License and Services Agreement that includes key topics such as Confidentiality, Data / Information Security (e.g. there is no known illicit Code in the software), Intellectual Property, Compliance with Anti-Corruption Laws, applicable Warranties / Indemnification etc.
    • We recommend you consider the Panorama Partners Program (https://www.labkey.com/products-services/mass-spectrometry-software/). It includes support for an in-house (or cloud hosted) Panorama Server as a central data store for your work in Skyline and instrument system suitability and QC tracking over time.
    • It is the only enterprise-level agreement we have to offer.

Hope this helps answer your questions and allows you to make use of Skyline and Panorama for your research.

--Brendan