Open Source, Collaboration and Getting Beyond the IP Innovation Roadblocks

This morning an announcement from four information technology companies, seven American universities and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation that Higher education and the IT industry address open software research

ARMONK, N.Y. and KANSAS CITY, MO., December 19, 2005 — Leaders from four information technology companies, seven American universities and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation announced today that they have adopted guiding principles to enable open collaborative software research.

Summit participants developing and adopting these principles include the Kauffman Foundation, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stanford, University of California at Berkeley, University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign, University of Texas at Austin, Cisco, HP, IBM and Intel. Additional collaborators include the National Science Foundation, the Office of U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman and the National Academies’ Government University Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR).

The Guidelines themselves look interesting, and mark a recognition that traditional proprietary approaches to protecting IP come at certain social and scientific costs.