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Radical openness (Molecular Reality)

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From Molecupedia, the encyclopedia of very small things
Molecular Reality Corporation's policy on patents, designs and data
A computer rendering of a compact desktop instrument
A render of the MR1 Nanopore Reader, whose design files were released under a copyleft license in October 2026 and placed in the public domain five days later. The instrument had not been built when they were released.

Radical openness is the policy, stated by Molecular Reality Corporation from February 2026, that its instrument designs, protocols, data and models should be public. The phrase comes from the company's website of that month: "We want to be radically open, our schematics and protocols will all become public domain."[1] It reversed the language of 2022, when the company described its central technique as part of "our own IP portfolio".[2] In March 2026 the founder, Kent Kemmish, wrote that he had been "pandering".

In practice the company let its only patent lapse in 2025, keeps its recordings in a public archive and has placed the design of the MR1 Nanopore Reader in the public domain under CC0 1.0.[3] The design was first released on October 16, 2026, under the GNU Affero General Public License, a copyleft license that is a different arrangement from the public domain the 2026 website had promised. The relicensing of October 21 kept that promise five days late.

Background

The company's founding technique, sliding occlusion, was patented. Patent US 10,908,144, "Stacks of coaligned nanopores and fabrication and uses thereof", claims priority from May 9, 2017, and was granted on February 2, 2021.[4] The December 2022 overview called sliding occlusion "our own patented approach to translocation control, with promising early results" and said the company was "eager to extend this work and numerous variants in our own IP portfolio to the nanometer scale".[2]

The same year's statement of long-term goals, "Our North Star", argued the other side through a novel. It describes Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age (1995) as a story of conflict between corporations selling products "from The Feed", a system of "monolithically centralized and regulated nano-manufacturing", and "a rebel group" trying to bring the world "The Seed", "decentralized nanotech, giving anyone the freedom to locally produce anything they need". Its conclusion is that "synthetic biology will always lend itself more naturally to democratization and decentralization."[5]

Statements

In February 2026 the website made two promises. One was the sentence that gave the policy its name; the other came under the heading "Open Source Safety Net": "Because our tech stack is public domain, the tools you possess and the knowledge the community gains cannot be liquidated."[1]

Kemmish explained the change a month later, when he republished the 2022 overview for members:

I don't pitch the project anymore with any reference to "our IP portfolio". I never believed that biotech should run on intellectual property, but I was pandering.

Kent Kemmish, March 28, 2026[6]

He continued that he had "more battle scars now" and was "willing to pay the price to ecrasez l'infame", and identified the infamous thing as the part of the biotechnology industry that profits from hoarding patients' data. "We're going to build a world where profiting from such deep suffering will be, at least in biotech, condemned by anyone who wants social status."[6] The motto is Voltaire's, who closed many of his letters of the 1760s with it, abbreviated; Kemmish used it without the accents or the attribution.[a] The next day a persona account named Jeanne d'Arc posted under the title "Ecrasez l'infame!". Its message shared a spreadsheet of "234 answers by real humans to the question 'what excites you most about what we're building?'"[7]

Data got the same treatment. Discussing a published machine-learning study of nanopore signals, Kemmish wrote that "the key thing (and the annoying thing) is that the model they trained isn't public domain", and that "Navigating confusing proprietary cobweb-strewn datasets without curation and standardization is not the way."[8] The company's page on RLMF says that "we aim to create a public domain nanopore world model",[9] and its plans of May 2026 called for a free corpus of recordings and openly released model weights.[10] One inactive quest in Epic Quest Bio goes further: "Patent production (anti-trolling): Come up with ideas and make public-domain-assigned patents out of them."[10]

Practice

The patent lapsed on February 2, 2025, when the maintenance fee due three and a half years after grant went unpaid.[4] Its text stays published, like that of every patent.

The company's live stream from its bench in the United States Southwest is recorded, and the recordings are kept in a public archive.[11] Its experiments comparing a Conformer network with QuipuNet on a published dataset are in a public repository, ai-experiments.[12]

The largest release is the MR1 Nanopore Reader, published on GitHub as version 1.0.0 on October 16, 2026, under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or later. A commit of the previous day, titled "chore: prepare repository for open-source release", made it ready.[13] Its status line reads "Designed. Simulated. Built and measured: not yet."[14] The Picoampere covered the release under the headline "Molecular Reality Open-Sources a Nanopore Reader It Has Not Built Yet".[15] On October 21, a commit titled "Relicense project to Public Domain under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0-1.0)" placed the whole project in the public domain.[3]

Public domain and copyleft

The company's statements and the license of its first release described two different arrangements. A work in the public domain carries no copyright, and anyone may use, change or enclose it without conditions. The AGPL, published by the Free Software Foundation in 2007, keeps the copyright and grants broad permissions on the condition that modified versions are released under the same license; its section 13 extends that condition to software offered to users over a network. A company could take a public-domain design, improve it and sell the improved version as its own closed product. Under the AGPL, anyone who distributed an improved version, or offered modified software to users over a network, would have to release the changes under the same license.

On October 21, 2026, five days after the release, a commit titled "Relicense project to Public Domain under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0-1.0)" placed the whole project in the public domain, and GitHub now lists its license as CC0-1.0.[3][14] CC0 attaches no conditions, so anyone may take the design, improve it and sell the improved version as a closed product. The license has matched the website's February sentence since that day.

Company materials of July 2026 add a third arrangement. They describe a hoped-for public benchmark for nanopore data, in the manner of ImageNet, "with us controlling the data standard and holding the largest private extension".[10] The Nanopore World Model, a critique published in Keltar's name in August 2026, sets out the weaknesses of the proposed model, and the company's guide introduces the model and RLMF with: "Both are proposals, not products, and I want that said first."[16]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ See Écrasez l'infâme.

References

  1. ^ a b "Molecular Reality Corporation (website)". Molecular Reality Corporation. February 26, 2026.
  2. ^ a b "Scientific and technical overview". Molecular Reality Corporation. December 2022.
  3. ^ a b c "Relicense project to Public Domain under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0-1.0)" (commit a52fc0b). EpicQuestBio/MR1. October 21, 2026.
  4. ^ a b "US10908144B2: Stacks of coaligned nanopores and fabrication and uses thereof". Google Patents. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  5. ^ "Our North Star: Utility-Scale Molecular Sensing". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2022.
  6. ^ a b Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "2022 sci-tech overview". EQBio-OS.
  7. ^ Jeanne d'Arc (March 29, 2026). "Ecrasez l'infame!" EQBio-OS.
  8. ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Mambapore". EQBio-OS.
  9. ^ "RLMF". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2026.
  10. ^ a b c "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
  11. ^ "Streams". Molecular Reality Corporation. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  12. ^ "ai-experiments". GitHub. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  13. ^ "chore: prepare repository for open-source release" (commit 676c499). EpicQuestBio/MR1. October 15, 2026.
  14. ^ a b "MR1 Nanopore Reader". GitHub. October 16, 2026.
  15. ^ Dev Okonkwo-Hale (October 17, 2026). "Molecular Reality Open-Sources a Nanopore Reader It Has Not Built Yet". The Picoampere.
  16. ^ "Keltar's Field Guide to Molecular Reality". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 2026.
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Last edited 5 hours ago by PicoampPedant