O’Reilly Network: Does Publicly Funded Research Have to Result in Open Source Code?

“A debate is heating up in the academic community over
whether software that is generated by publicly funded research must
be released with an open source license. The Internet is one
example of how releasing research code benefited the public, but
the trend seems to be changing now, and universities are more
likely to consider the profit opportunity. The Bayh-Dole Act paved
the way for the privatization of publicly funded resources, but not
everyone is happy with the results.

Against the tide of privatization comes a group of
bioinformatics researchers and programmers with an online petition
to require that all software created by publicly funded research
projects be licensed as open source. They have founded a group and
a Web site, OpenInformatics.org, to further this cause.

Here we present two opposing viewpoints on this issue…”

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