Earlier today, I got an email from Hari pointing me to a note from Axel Brunger on the CCP4 mailing list with the sad news that Warren Delano had passed away. I got to know Warren during my time at Accelrys, and was lucky enough to discuss science and visualization with him on more than one occasion (we didn’t exactly agree on everything, but it was always a healthy debate), so I am still trying to absorb the news. To say it is shocking would be an understatement
For those who don’t know, Warren was the author of PyMol, the best pure viewer I have ever used, and a revolution in it’s day. An open source viewer better than anything you paid for. It was certainly a key reason why companies like Accelrys ended up releasing free molecular viewers. Seeing slide after slide at conferences showing figures generated in PyMol was a clear sign that it was possible for open source software to be best in breed.
Warren Delano, entrepreneur, open source advocate, scientist, and maker of one of the best software packages ever, Thank You!!! You will be missed. I hope the community can pick up PyMol and continue developing it
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[...] 1.2 on Ubuntu Linux PyMOL is a molecular visualisation tool developed by Dr. Warren DeLano, which unfortunately passed away about one week ago. It is the most intuitive program of its kind I’ve used, it supports scripting with both its [...]