[Freegis-list] OSS Funding

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

Hi Paul,

On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 11:45:13AM -0800, Paul Ramsey wrote:
> I would encourage any company working on OSS projects to consider
> academic partnerships. The advantages are several: many governments
> offer incentives to encourage university/private sector joint R&D
> projects; using academic resources like graduate students in projects
> increases the number of developers with a "critical mass" understanding
> of the project, and therefor the health of the project in general; many
> hands make light work, it is not always possible to do everything
> yourself.
> 
> Similarly, I would encourage academics to approach private companies in
> the field. If they can leverage contributions to an OSS research project
> through government matching funds, establish relationships with quality
> potential staffers (graduate students), and get good publicity by
> providing cash and in-kind funding, that is alot of positives to being
> part of an OSS project.
> 
> I encourage all Canadian OSS GIS people to be sure to check out the
> GeoInnovations and GeoConnections projects, which are very favourable in
> terms of funding OSS projects. Also the federal SRED program which
> provides tax credits for pure R&D. I am sure other people have info on
> their respective countries too.

thank you very much for this post on consideration of Free Software 
in funded projects! As Bernhard already pointed out, we must also
take care that Free Software works commercially without funding.

However, on the funding idea I encourage all Europeans to
consider Free Software in their EC proposals. Actually, Academia
naturally must apply/develop Free Software for any scientific project.
Sharing comprehensible knowledge is the core of science and
this essentially means to share source codes and rights
to change/improve them just like other scientific outcomes.
Its a pity that most universities nowadays try to produce
proprietary goods and don't share the knowledge any more.
The EC proposal evaluators (I was one twice) are not blind
to this fact and prefer proposals where Free Software
is promised rather than proprietary stuff. Currently
there are far to few proposals considering Free Software
- please submit more!

	Jan

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

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