Tim Benson wrote:
> See this week's BMJ (April 7, pages 863-4) for 3 letters on open source
> http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/322/7290/863/a, including my own. If I
> was writing today, I would not have cast doubts about the GPL.
>
Good work, thanks for pointing this discussion out.,
Re: your comments:
"In no other industry are the products deliberately kept
secret when that secrecy cannot be justified by safety or
security concerns."
I initially thought you meant the health care software
industry, but this comment is inclusive of nearly all software.
"An obvious route forward for the public sector would be to
state that all software developed at the public's expense be
licensed as open source,.."
I have made similar statements here and in private to HHS
officials. However, I have had considerably more input to
this statement and I think the issue is sufficiently
complicated that it bears a larger discussion.
1) The revenue stream from patents, secrecy and selling
software as a product can be viewed as the incentive for
developing the software product in the first place.
It can then be argued that having such things done wholly
or partially at public expense is akin to governmental
economic policy to stimulate the economy by providing
protections to certain industries.
To counter that argument, one must show that innovation
and economic health is not impaired by open source. I think
the most persuasive evidence of that I have seen has been
provided by Dr. Lessig - check our archives for more discussion.
2) Publically funded academic research as an exception.
On the one hand, it can be argued that the essence of
academic freedom involves publically accessable knowledge.
For example, MIT recently announced they were putting all
their course materials on line with open access (not text
books or other books, but course packs, outlines, reading
lists, class notes, etc.) to reaffirm their committment to
academic freedom.
On the other hand, some branches of science rely heavily on
hardware/software innovation. For example the
genomics/proteomics research space is largely dominated by
commercial companies and products. The causes academic
research to veer from open source and knowledge sharing as
the opportunity to make money are great and research success
often is dependent upon vendor partnerships! Just look at
IBM, SUN and Compaq competing for these research data centers.
