public infrastructure and research policy tenders

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

I'll be talking about "free software as a public infrastructure" at
eurochina2002.com, and I have been studying the various public tenders of
EU (such as IST, EContent eEurope etc) and member countries.

It made me discover some sad news about our research ministry, see also

        http://swpat.ffii.org/news/

I am particularly interested in provisions about the "intellectual
property" and success benchmarking of the state-financed results. My main
statement is that published free software should be a major benchmark in
every project, while patents, at least if not under RF license, are a
rather negative benchmark.

All this has to a large degree arisen from the habit of equating
restrictions on information with property.  If EU agricultural policy
says that any goods produced as a part of this work shall belong to the
bidders, that is natural, because there is a question of "whom shall it
belong to" and saying that "this cow is in the public domain" would
create practical problems.  But with information, it is the other way
around.  The default purpose of IST etc should be to produce public
information.  That doesn't exclude people from creating some proprietary
information as well, but in any case the value of the public information
created should be a paramount accounting category.  However in projects
such as EContent or EUN ETB Thesaurus and what not I do not find this
category anywhere.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
100,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/