The article mentions performing myriad assays as a rate-limiting step in drug discovery. My employer https://www.synthace.com is trying to accelerate this process through software. We’ve created a platform to easily program liquid handling robots to perform complex protocols, and to do so using a Design-of-Experiments[1] approach to investigate multiple factors simultaneously. It’s early days for this approach but we’ve already had pharma customers using it to significantly accelerate their drug discovery process.
I use his work, but for me the situation is more complicated my prior experiences with the author.
He's been making similar complaints about his lack of renumeration for quite a while. In an older GitHub where he requested contributions, I pointed out that he had barely worked on the project for many months (at that time), and not published a new version to npm in years[1], despite making a $600 withdrawal from his Open Collective fund in June 2018 with the explicit purpose of releasing v5[2].
In the thread, I suggested that I and others might be willing to contribute, but I wanted more certainty on what exactly my contribution would be paying for. As I saw it, at that point he had a number of regular donors who were essentially paying him to do nothing.
He responded very angrily, saying nobody had any right to question his actions or to expect anything from him, even if they were paying him. He then deleted my comment entirely and banned me from commenting further. This interaction didn't exactly leave me with a strong desire to contribute. I think he's a rather volatile individual and the community would indeed be better off forking this project than indulging his sense of grievance.
It's more akin to Best Buy telling me I need to visit the house of every customer who bought my widget and slightly break it, otherwise they'll stop selling said widget. And if I try to tell my customer "Best Buy is making me do this", that's "irrelevant".
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments