The difference is quality. The existing open source solutions are frankly not good enough. Industry should come together to sponsor an open version that matches the quality of vendors which will become the canonical source of truth for the world.
What's the monetary benefit to the industry in doing that?
The open source solutions aren't good because validating and fixing this data is very time consuming (read: expensive) and carried legal liability (read: expensive). Open source tends to not be good at requiring many people to do tedious things (see: most open source documentation). Companies could pay people to do it but then you've recreated a commercial vendor except competitors who don't pay get a benefit. Companies tend to open source things which are not direct competitive advantages for others in the same industry while this would be exactly that.
The commercial databases aren't great either, the information sure scripts has doesn't match first databank for example in many cases. it's not wrong just formatted slightly different so it's hard to compare against.
Ah, thank you for clarifying.
What are the issues with currently available open drug information resources compared to commercial ones? I can imagine they might have information about fewer drugs, or less up-to-date information, or not enough of some kinds of information, etc.
