Universities working to develop opensource software with IBM

| 12.19.2006 | 06:00:198110 |

December 19 '06: Through a collaborative effort to develop open-source software for the privacy, medical and security industries, seven universities and IBM are working to eliminate many of the legal boundaries experts say are hurting research and development as well as cooperative relationships.

The International Herald Tribune reported recently that the Open Collaborative Research program is behind the recent efforts breaking "with the usual pattern of corporate-sponsored research at universities that typically involves lengthy negotiations over intellectual property rights."

The seven universities: Purdue; Carnegie Melon; Universities of California at Berkeley and Davis; Columbia University; Georgia Institute of Technology; and Rutgers University; began the development program last year with Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Cisco as well as IBM.

The software will help develop privacy and security software as well as "software quality, mathematical optimization software, and clinical decision support software," the Herald reported.

A news release from Georgia Institute of Technology reported that all the developed software "will be made available as open-source software code and all additional intellectual property developed based on those results will be openly published or made available royalty-free."

Project leaders told the Herald their goal was to eliminate many of the legal boundaries currently hampering research and development in the U.S.' universities. Elisa Bertino, a computer scientist at Purdue told the Herald, "You want to work on problems where your research could have a big impact. ... And this could be a way to collaborate with corporations, and be able to work on those kinds of problems."