OSS Watch, in collaboration with Open Directive, are providing licensing, development, community and sustainability support to the project, which is now getting very close to a new release.

Developers have frozen the code and are preparing beta versions of DataStage and DataBank, which will be available for testing as virtual machines. Please keep an eye on the project website and twitter channel for updates on when and where you will be able to access them.

We will hold a launch workshop in Oxford on 2 March with colleagues from the VIDaaS project, who are building an exciting cloud-deployable Database as a Service system.

Attendance is free but places are filling quickly, so book early to avoid disappointment.

Like its previous version, MPL2 has been acknowledged as a free software license by the Free Software Foundation and as an Open Source license by the Open Software Initiative.

The most important changes from the previous version include:

• MPL2 is simpler and shorter;
• addresses the recent changes in copyright law and incorporates feedback from lawyers outside the United States;
• offer patent protections aligned with other open source licenses, which allow communities to protect contributors if these are sued;
• provides compatibility with the Apache and GPL licenses, making code reuse and redistribution easier.

The answers varied, but people seemed to perceive the diversity of points of view involved in this cross-cultural exercise as beneficial. The delegates with an industry background praised the deep thinking and creativity of researchers, while academics were impressed with the down-to-earth revenue-generating mindset of their industry colleagues.

The early feedback we got from the first event of the series was equally positive.

Open Source Junction 3, due later this year, will continue to facilitate the encounter between the academic and business cultures focused on open development in the mobile sector.

Watch this space.

———————————-

Camille Baldock, Softwire

Click here to view the embedded video.

—————————————————–

Steven Gray, University College London

Click here to view the embedded video.

————————

Julian Harty, ebay

Click here to view the embedded video.

——————————

Samuel Carlyle, Sukey

Click here to view the embedded video.

————————————

Nick Allott, NquiringMinds

Click here to view the embedded video.

———————————————-

Tim Fernando, University of Oxford

Click here to view the embedded video.

————————————————

Philipp Breuss-Schneeweis, Wikitude

Click here to view the embedded video.

——————————————

Yuwei Lin, University of Salford

Click here to view the embedded video.

————————–

Dave Raggett, W3C

Click here to view the embedded video.

—————————————

Gabriel Hanganu, OSS Watch

Click here to view the embedded video.

This second event in the Open Source Junction series targets specifically context-aware mobile technologies. Speakers from industry and higher education institutions will present their most recent work and will explore opportunities for collaboration in this area.

For more information about sessions and speakers, and to register, please check the OSS Watch event page. Early bird registration ends tomorrow.

Following the successful Open Source Junction 1 back in March, Open Source Junction 2 will focus on context-aware mobile technologies. In computer science, context-awareness refers to the idea that computers can both sense and react based on their environment. Context includes location (the users’ absolute or relative position, surrounding resources, physical conditions, such as noise or light levels), but is also understood as a broader process involving users themselves (their habits or emotional states, patterns of social interaction, types of activity, etc.).

This two-day workshop, to be held on 5-6 July at Wolfson College in Oxford, will showcase a selection of context-aware mobile projects and provide delegates with key knowledge of open innovation and open development. Participants from both industry and academia will also have a unique opportunity to explore potential partnerships in the field of context-aware mobile technologies. Registration is now open.

I hope to see some of you at the event.

As Jeff explained, about 20 years ago the central Camden residents were offered a gardening plot in an attempt to counter the effects of the visually appalling derelict buildings and tall blocks of flats that dominated the area. People started growing vegetables, and over the years the plot became the hub of a thriving gardening community.

Bangladeshi women in particular became effective users of these allotments. They grew vegetables for their daily needs using techniques they had learned from their parents and grandparents in Bangladesh. For them gardening was a key source of food, and over the years they became experts in producing sustainable gardens with minimal financial investment. One way of increasing cultivation space was to build ramshackle supports that favoured the 3D expansion of the plants.

It was these string-bound wooden structures that intrigued Jeff Travers in the first place. He examined them with his architect hat on, but at the same time he was curious about their role in increasing vegetable production. By growing his own plants next to those of the Bangladeshi families, Jeff learned a lot about sustainable gardening using traditional techniques, such as saving seeds and using recyclable natural materials.

Jeff’s collaboration with the Bangladeshi women gardeners brought him a silver medal. The right topic in the right place at the right time, one might say. However, according to Jeff, designing and building the garden was not such a simple task:

It’s quite an architectural problem to translate Bangladeshi allotments to suit the Hampton Court setting. We’ve used the intensive Bangladeshi horticultural techniques in the growing of the plants, but we’ve arranged them in a way that conforms to the written rules of 18th century potager of which the garden of Hampton Court Palace was modeled.

This story is a good illustration of open innovation facilitated by connecting groups with apparently disparate sets of skills. To design his prize-winning garden Jeff put together the knowledge networks of the traditional Bangladeshi gardeners, the skills of their British offspring who adapted these techniques to the London context, and his own ‘architect-cum-gardener’ ability to translate these in the lingo of a professional garden design competition.

In fact such processes happen all around us at various levels. As Roland Harwood pointed out in his recent keynote at TransferSummit:

Many organisations are beginning to embrace more open and collaborative approaches to innovation. Inspired by the success of open source products such as the Apache web server and the Firefox browser, many multinational companies such as Procter and Gamble, Orange and IBM have made ‘open innovation’ – the sharing of the risks and rewards of the product development process with partners – a top strategic priority.

Academic institutions had been there long before the businesses:

The open source software movement has been a pioneer in product development which many others have sought to emulate. Like the open source movement, academic institutions have laid the foundations for a model of shared knowledge and incentives based upon reputation rather than ownership.

Increasingly however this academic model is fading out. As recent evidence demonstrates, especially in academic research funding and publication-driven assessment distort the natural balance between peer recognition and institutional hierarchy:

Research assessment exercise encourages individuals to publish independently, to keep things secret while there can be many advantages to their career, no matter if they have been funded publicly or not, because by doing that they appear to be better by the criteria used for measurement of the research assessment exercise. That’s a major cultural problem, because it makes it too difficult to persuade scientists to be open with their data, they fear losing it, and therefore their current position.

TransferSummit revealed that both academic and business teams are seeking inspiration from open development practice. More and more academic departments and businesses understand that by pooling together the expertise of their diversely skilled people they maximise opportunities for mutually beneficial innovation.

But understanding diversity in terms of domain or product expertise is not enough. While brainstorming with inter-disciplinary or professionally diverse teams can be productive, we need to bear in mind that innovation is not just generating new ideas. In fact, as Roland suggests, in the context of our expanding access to global knowledge, one’s expertise is becoming less important:

The cost associated with finding new knowledge is falling fast, to a point where in the not too distant future we can reasonably assume that all knowledge will be in principal accessible [...]. In this scenario our knowledge will no longer differentiate us as individuals or organisations.

The professional diversity of the innovation teams will remain important, but increasingly cultural diversity will become their true unique selling point. As Jeff’s success story implies, his prize-winning garden was less the result of him acquiring in-depth knowledge of Bangladeshi gardening techniques, and more of him experiencing this knowledge in action, in the ways his Bangladeshi gardening mentors had internalized and used it for their daily needs.

In other words, what is becoming important is the diverse cultural practice of the innovation team members, rather than just their external expert knowledge. More than just being clued in about growing veggies differently, the ideal candidates for open innovation will be eating their own grown.

The lack of a common language for all categories of research stakeholders was also identified in studies of UK research infrastructure, as OSS Watch pointed out. Despite an impressive array of online systems and services aimed at helping researchers carry out their research, these technologies are often employed below their full potential. One way to improve this situation is to take stock of some key lessons from open source development, which include providing an open space for expressing the needs and concerns of researchers, software developers, service providers, and indeed all external partners, including businesses, who may wish to join the community.

OSS Watch conceived TransferSummit precisely to address this lack of mutual understanding between the academic and business research stakeholders interested in open development and open innovation. Two of the academic projects we advised recently have started to benefit from collaborating with non-academic partners. TexGen’s decision to make their research software freely available resulted in attracting supplementary grants and facilitating industry collaboration, while Wookie’s choice to join the Apache Software Foundation’s Incubator attracted interest from both the academic and commercial sectors. Both these and other academic projects will feature at TransferSummit, along with key representatives from open source businesses and software foundations, including in no particular order, Red Hat, Sourcesense, Sirius, WSO2, Indiginox, Day, HP, Amazon, Gnome, Apache, Codeplex, Mozilla, LiMo, Wikimedia, who will discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with academic-industry partnerships.

French research may not be ‘wired for innovation’, but is UK ready to reap the benefits of open innovation emerging from the dialogue of the academic and business sectors? Join us at TransferSummit to find out.

Although its focus is the US, many of the principles set out in the article apply equally in Europe. It’s written for the legal fraternity, but will be of interest to anyone wanting an overview of trademarks in FOSS, or simply further insight into the whole thorny area. As a relative newcomer to open source, I found it very useful having so much information in one place. Great value for half-an-hour’s reading!

OSS Watch discusses some of these subjects in documents including Open source development – an introduction to ownership and licensing issues and Free and open source software and your patents. Some will also be covered at our forthcoming open source event, TransferSummit.