The Future of Rosetta is Now.

For a long time, the core of the Rosetta Commons value and impact has been found in the people as much as the software.  While Rosetta’s technical development and contributions to science have had a huge impact, it is equally true that much of what the Rosetta Commons has done well has been collaboration, training, and building relationships across so many labs. 

Today, we are a community in transition. The Rosetta Commons began as a loose collection of cooperating scientists, joined by a University of Washington IP agreement. Since then, we’ve grown, and our more mature community has adopted more mature structures.

We joined the Open Molecular Software Foundation, made our repositories publicly viewable,  and put them on GitHub under a non-commercial, open license. Many newer algorithms from the Rosetta Commons are Open Source. The team at OMSF has helped us think through many tricky questions about how to move ever closer to open source.  They also provide crucial operational support for our work by providing HR, legal, and accounting resources.  Perhaps most importantly, OMSF also houses Open Fold and other peer projects. We look forward to working more with OMSF’s projects and finding ways to support each other’s work.

The drive toward open source pushed Rosetta to examine its revenue model. Though current revenue meets our budgetary needs, we face an industry in transition and a changing landscape for Rosetta software code contributions.  The Rosetta Commons mostly uses its revenue to support conferences, training, and technical infrastructure, and maintaining the ability to continue that level of support for community activity is important to us.  We decided to test revenue sources beyond the licensing of the traditional Rosetta software. 

After examining many options, we found an opportunity that is well-aligned with the Rosetta community and completed an acquisition of the Bench product line from Cyrus Biotech. The bench is a GUI interface to molecular modeling tools, chief among them classical Rosetta algorithms and functionality.  It opens access to researchers who aren’t already Rosetta experts, which expands our community to include whole new groups of scientists.  And because Bench is an interface to tools beyond just classical Rosetta, it lets users more easily integrate across different software packages and methods.  This will connect the Rosetta Software Suite to more projects over time.

We made two big changes to accommodate the Bench acquisition.  First, we formed a non-profit, Rosetta Commons Foundation, to own and manage this effort.  Then, we formed a for-profit company, Levitate Bio, as a dedicated place to manage Bench as a commercial effort.  This hybrid structure (similar to that used by Mozilla, the makers of the Firefox browser) allows Bench to pursue commercial success. At the same time, a non-profit, values-based community board oversees its work and brings created revenue back to the community.  We expect Levitate to provide stable revenue in the medium- to long term.

OMSF, RCF, and Levitate are all part of the Rosetta Commons’ expanded Rosetta universe. These new structures provide a firm organizational footing to support the Rosetta Commons and its community activities well into the future.

Looking ahead, our work continues.  We secured NSF funding for our phase-II POSE (Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems) project. We are interviewing community stakeholders, building our ecosystem including supporting new deep learning codes, and seeking sustainable routes to a true Open Source license. Levitate is ramping up and working towards profitability. RCF will establish a strong foundation and legal home for  Levitate and will eventually grow into a home for a broader set of community activities. OMSF is our backstop for so much organizational structure, and there are opportunities for us to work more closely with them as we make more moves toward being fully open.

In a very real sense, the future of Rosetta is now.  Our core mission remains to provide a foundation that defines and accelerates the frontiers of knowledge in biomolecular modeling and design.  We will need to adapt new structures, new collaborations, and an evolving community to handle the changes happening around us.  Over time, changes in the landscape of protein modeling software will require the Rosetta Commons to grow and reach for new challenges as we promote the development of the best biomolecular modeling software.