Microsoft Open Source BioInformatics - Using Software to Advance Healthcare
research.microsoft.com
research.microsoft.com
One interesting point of comparison - if you look at say Apple or Sun (RIP) open source contributions, they tend to be in the low level, OS and programming fields - I'm thinking of LLVM, OpenCL, ZFS, Dtrace, etc.
MS's innovation tends to be more user visible, like this and Deep Zoom.
There are tons of researchers (the people this software is targeted towards) inside for-profit pharmaceutical companies who spend their entire lives trying to advance healthcare. I'm not saying everyone who works at a pharma is an automatic saint, far from it. But, people who work on the research side are genuinely motivated by the desire to make the world a better place and cure disease. It's a good thing too, because the work on its own sucks. You spend months or even years on something promising, only to find out it's a failure for reasons completely unknown to you (biology is a fickle thing). Then you pick up, and go back to the drawing board. If you're exceedingly lucky, maybe one or two things you've worked on in your career will become an actual drug. If it weren't for the knowledge that your work might actually help someone some day, it would be awfully hard to get out of bed in the morning.
you mean nothing good ever came from a for-profit non-open source company?