Twelve Leaders Adopt Principles to Accelerate Innovation

Leaders from four
information technology companies, seven American universities and the Ewing
Marion Kauffman Foundation announced today that they have adopted
first-of-a-kind guiding principles to accelerate collaborative research for
open source software.

Specifically, the companies and universities agreed:

-- That intellectual property arising from selected research
collaborations will be made available free of charge for commercial and
academic use.
-- To an established set of guidelines that address the rights of the
participants and the public.

These twelve enterprises believe the principles will accelerate innovation
and contribute to open software research across a breadth of initiatives,
thus enabling the development of related industry standards and greater
interoperability, while managing intellectual property in a more balanced
manner.

"Open source software and open standards jointly developed by universities,
government and industry can create a powerful platform for collaborative
innovation," said Dr. John E. Kelly III, senior vice president of
Technology & Intellectual Property for IBM. "These principles are based on
a balanced approach to IP management and should stimulate additional joint
industry and university research projects."

In August, IBM and the Kauffman Foundation, a private foundation that
focuses on advancing innovation and entrepreneurship, cosponsored a
University and Industry Innovation Summit at the Georgetown University Law
Center in Washington, DC. To accelerate collaborative innovation, current
intellectual property barriers were evaluated and plans were drafted to
support a variety of research relationships. Recognizing the existence of
a complex continuum of possible research partnerships, the Summit team
agreed to address open collaboration models, in particular instances where
researchers will create and disseminate software knowledge freely to the
public.

"American universities and industry have a long history of collaborative
efforts that have spawned significant innovations and fueled our
entrepreneurial economy," said Lesa Mitchell, vice president of Advancing
Innovation at the Kauffman Foundation. "It is imperative to take the
lessons from these collaborative relationships so that we may improve the
process by which discoveries and innovations move into the marketplace."

J. Strother Moore, chair of the Department of Computer Sciences at The
University of Texas at Austin added, "Open collaboration can be especially
important for university computer science departments, where ready access
to industrial experts and data can help us focus in a timely way on the
right problems to solve. In addition, open collaboration resonates with
our primary mission to society: education and the creation and
dissemination of knowledge."

Pervasive acceptance of the open collaboration principles by other
universities and the IT industry, as well as the development of guiding
principles for other research agreements remains at the core of the Summit
team's continuing agenda. The goal is to shorten the time from the first
spark, or idea, to the commencement of research on that idea.

Summit participants developing and adopting these principles include the
Kauffman Foundation, Carnegie Mellon University (Penn.), Georgia Institute
of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (N.Y.), Stanford University
(Calif.), University of California at Berkeley, University of Illinois -
Urbana-Champaign, The University of Texas at Austin, Cisco, HP, IBM and
Intel. Additional collaborators include the National Science Foundation,
the Office of U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman and the National Academies'
Government University Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR).