[Insight-developers] SUPPORT OPEN SOURCE: make your voice heard! : Free Water != Free Beer

[Luis Ibanez]

ITK Developers:


                OPEN SOURCE NEEDS YOUR HELP


As you probably know, despite the fact that you can use ITK for free,
the development and maintenance of the ITK toolkit has required a
significant amount of funding, approximately $13 Million USD so far.


The large majority of this funding has been provided by the US
National Library of Medicine (NLM), one of the National Institutes
of Health (NIH). The funding has supported the efforts of researchers,
grad students, undergrad students, and engineers in several institutions
both in industry and academia for the past seven years.


The product of each one of those funding dollars has been made fully
available to the public without restriction. You can enjoy ITK today
in the form of the source code releases, documentation, and community
support. You are allowed to build commercial products with the software,
you are allowed to copy, distribute, modify and distribute the
modifications of the software without having to pay any royalties.


When planning the creation of ITK, NLM officers were wise enough to
learn what "Open Source" meant and what its benefits were. As a result
they made sure that ITK was going to be made available under a license
that allowed the software to be used by both academic and commercial
institutions, and that allowed derivative works to be created without
restrictions.


More recently other US federal funding agencies are also embracing
the practice of open source software, but unfortunately, unlike the
NLM, they have not defined quite well what "Open Source" actually
means, and as a result they are investing public funds but not getting
back for the public the benefits that they were expecting from projects
that claim to provide "Open Source" software.


Participants of the Open Source movement have converged to agree in
the definition of "Open Source" as it is stated by the Open Source
Initiative:

                   http://www.opensource.org/

by the following list of Freedoms that the software's license
should grant:

               http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd


As you should know by now:

        The License *is* what makes software "Open Source"


We have observed recently that a number of groups are claiming to
develop "Open Source" software, but are using licenses that do not
grant all the freedoms listed in the definition of the OSI. These
groups pursue the advantage of federal funding under the argument
that they will be providing the public with the benefit of
"Open Source" software, but not quite deliver on the expectations
of that promise.


Given that public funding is one of the major sources of support
for *real* open source software, we see this practice with great
concern.


We will like to bring to the attention of funding agencies that
a clear definition of "Open Source" should be adopted, and we
will like to suggest that the OSI definition, as the current
consensus of the open source movement, is the right definition
to adopt.


We have suggested this idea to the OSI and they are opening
the issue to be discussed as a blog entry in their web site:


      "Public Advocacy for Open Source Software"
          "Preferences and Requirements"
        http://www.opensource.org/node/199


Whether you are in favor or against, please let your opinion be
heard in this discussion.

In order to post comments in the OSI blog, you should register
at http://www.opensource.org/user/register, by just using your
email.



     Thanks


         Luis