High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Supporters of free open source Bioinformatics software largely attribute the explosion of successful bioinformatics applications and research projects in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, to the open sharing between research groups of the algorithms and methods used to make new observations from biological data. The early tradition of disclosing algorithms and even code may have stemmed from adherence to the principals of the scientific method which requires an explanation of the methods used to achieve a novel observation so that a reasonably skilled peer might repeat the procedure. This sharing allowed each new discovery to be more quickly built upon what the others had done.
