Open and Free: companies and academia provide meaning to simple words
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Four leading IT companies -Cisco, HP, IBM and Intel- have agreed, along with 7 Universities and the Kauffman Foundation, to adopt a set of guiding principles to accelerate collaborative research for Open Source software. The initiative is a "first-of-a-kind" agreement, based on the belief that collaboration can "improve the process by which discoveries and innovations move into the marketplace", as explained by Lesa Mitchell, vice president for advancing innovation at the Kauffman Foundation.
IBM and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation had co-sponsored a conference at Georgetown University Law Center last August, where Open Collaboration Principles were drafted, to guide and support university-industry research relationships, particularly those aimed at creating software knowledge to be freely used by the public.
Participant organizations have now agreed that intellectual property arising from such collaborations will be made available free of charge for commercial and academic use. Besides, they will follow a set of guidelines addressing the rights of both the organizations and the public.
This collaborative partnership is in line with the Open Source Initiative, which is based on a philosophy of free redistribution for software products and their derived works which not only promotes access to programs´ source code but also guarantees a royalty free distribution of programming tools such us those used by ifPeople: Plone Content Managment System, Zope Application Server, Python programming language and MapServer Online Mapping, among others.
The Open Source Initiative together with the Free Software Foundation are the two main organizations that work to give a new meaning to the "open" and "free" concepts, as they provide framework philosophies that address the rights and needs of all participants involved, while improving commercial opportunities and innovative solutions. This is why Open Source is one of ifPeoples core values.
For entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized companies, Free Software and Open Source are beneficial in that they promote sustainable development, and a greater participation in software creation. Free Software also offers an organization the control of its technology because essentially the user is the owner. This can foster organizational self-sufficiency since users have the ability to modify the software according to particular needs. One more advantage of the Free Software philosophy is that it allows savings in software costs both as regards licenses and updating costs. Find here more information on the benefits of Free Software.
Sources:
http://www.kauffman.org/items.cfm?itemID=662
http://fdncenter.org/pnd/news/story.jhtml?id=126800009
http://www.kauffman.org/pdf/open_collaboration_principles_12_05.pdf http://www.physorg.com/news9695.html
http://www.opensource.org/
http://www.fsf.org/
http://www.ifpeople.net/services/tech/tools
