Beyond the Code
or, how to win friends, influence people and make a living by writing open source software. It's not just about the code.
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Thursday 16 July 2009, 1:03 PM
Aussie ICT researchers open up
NICTA, Australia's ICT research organisation, has released a bunch of projects as open source and collected them in one portal called OpenNICTA. NICTA is a government-funded body which aims to be a centre of excellence for computing and IT research. It also aims to commercialise the products of the research it does.
The projects collected on OpenNICTA are quite varied, but all lower level frameworks and libraries, rather than finished applications. Most are released under the GPL or BSD licences.
If the aim of all this work it to maximise the benefit to Australia, why then give away the software developed at NICTA? First, you're giving Australian taxpayers — and don't forget businesses are taxpayers too — easy and equal access to the fruits of the research. Using existing open source licences also means NICTA's administration overhead is virtually nil.
It also means those of us outside Australia get a look-in too, and that the Aussies can get the benefit of developers outside their country who choose to submit patches to the projects.
For publicly-funded software like NICTA's, release as open source is the fairest way of getting value back to the people who've paid for it. Other countries should learn from Australia's example.
The projects collected on OpenNICTA are quite varied, but all lower level frameworks and libraries, rather than finished applications. Most are released under the GPL or BSD licences.
If the aim of all this work it to maximise the benefit to Australia, why then give away the software developed at NICTA? First, you're giving Australian taxpayers — and don't forget businesses are taxpayers too — easy and equal access to the fruits of the research. Using existing open source licences also means NICTA's administration overhead is virtually nil.
It also means those of us outside Australia get a look-in too, and that the Aussies can get the benefit of developers outside their country who choose to submit patches to the projects.
For publicly-funded software like NICTA's, release as open source is the fairest way of getting value back to the people who've paid for it. Other countries should learn from Australia's example.
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