Application of COTS Components: A Software Package for Crystallography

Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) technology is widely used in many industries and also in scientific computing. This paper will first explore the term itself and then tries to find how it typically manifests itself in the softwares used in physical sciences. Some details regarding one of the popular software used for crystal structure elucidation in Crystallography, viz., SHELX are furnished. Since this is a freely available program and a non-commercial one, it is better to consider this as an example of Scientific Off-The-Shelf (SOTS) components, a newly coined acronym.