ConsortiumInfo: Where (If Anywhere) are the Boundaries of the Open Source Concept?

“In the last several days there have been several stories in the
news that highlight the increasing tension between ownership of
intellectual property rights (IPR) and the opportunities that
become available when broader, free access to those rights is made
available. The three articles that struck me as best proving this
point were the announcement by Sun Microsystems that it had
released the design for its new UltraSPARC processor under the GNU
GPL, a speech by Tim Berners-Lee to an Oxford University audience
in which he challenged the British government to make Ordnance
Survey mapping data available at no cost for Web use, and reports
that a Dutch court had upheld the validity of the Creative Commons
license. Each of these stories demonstrates a breach in traditional
thinking about the balance of value to an IPR owner between
licensing those rights for profit, or making those same rights
freely and publicly available…”

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