Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Chapter 3.11 – Free research and development

Excerpt from the book »Gradido – Natural Economy of Life«

Open source: free research and development


»All new ideas and inventions belong to the community. Just imagine, earlier we wasted over a hundred years building vehicles with combustion engines
– Joytopia

In the computer branch, particularly in software programming, a gratifying development has been noticeable for some years in the form of free software or the open-source movement. The idea is simple: a programmer makes his development freely available to the entire community of developers. Everybody is allowed to use his software, modify it and develop it further on condition that the creator is mentioned by name and the developments based on it are also made available to the community on the same conditions. Wonderful software has been created in this way. Most of the internet is based on open-source software, in particular the Linux operating system, with which most internet servers run nowadays.

Open source is also becoming common in other fields, for example open content for text and images. There is, for example, a shortened edition of this book as a free e-book. It is published under a Creative Commons license. Anyone is allowed to copy it for non-commercial purposes. Yes, it is even explicitly desired to send the free e-book to all your friends since the world needs a solution as soon as possible and the contents of this book can contribute decisively to solving the current problems. It certainly needs to be optimised and for this very reason it is important for as many people as possible to know about it and help to develop it further.

Research and development also need to become free in all other fields. It is unacceptable that inventions and discoveries that could serve humanity are locked away from the public due to antiquated patent and copyright laws because they are not in the interests of some companies. Therefore we recommend open source for all fields of research. We need free research, free development, free thinking – and free donation…

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