Development and maintenance of sire was originally ad-hoc, conducted by PhDs, PDRAs and academic staff as a secondary concern behind the daily demands of their research projects. This became increasingly untenable as commercial use of sire grew. Initially, maintenance moved to be funded as a side-activity of larger academic/industrial grants (e.g. EP/P022138/1, which funded development of BioSimSpace) or academic/industrial Impact Acceleration Awards with industrial users. Eventually, these became untenable for a variety of reasons. A major factor was that provision of maintenance to existing research software is not a strong focus of research-intensive Universities. This realisation led to the creation of the not-for-profit OpenBioSim Community Interest Company (), which enables provision of professional scientific software engineering services to a variety of stakeholders in academia and industry. The remit of OpenBioSim is the development and maintenance of open-source biomolecular simulation software. It currently supports both sire and BioSimSpace.