While I agree with the premise that open source could, in theory, serve the long tail better, I think the barrier to entry of pharmacological research is far higher than that of software development. It should be noted that this is not without reason. Controlled, double-blind studies are necessary for development of medicine and they are hard to do without a substantial amount of funds.

This barrier to entry may decrease as biological models become cheaper and more accessible, but even as a hopeful bioinformatician, I am skeptical of this happening in the near term (10-15 years).