What's the most ambitious open source project that you can name? How about the most ambitious open source project coming from a government entity?
The best government example I can think of is the projects being supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute. Why?
- All of their software is public domain (US Gov't regulations)
- Much of their software is built upon Open Source software (Apache, Perl, etc.)
- It's an amazingly large problem domain that these researchers (in academia, government and industry) are trying to crack.
Surely there are other ambitious projects out there. (I'm trying to avoid the obvious ones like "the web", "email" and "the internet" to focus on bigger problems than linking computers together.)
For certain values of "public"
quidity on 2002-07-11T17:58:10
Government funded research in America is only in the American public domain, us smelly ferriners must still ask nicely if we want to use it -- I've never not been allowed to do so though -- just don't tell Richard Stallman...
How can that be?
jand on 2002-07-11T19:30:53
Public domain means that there is *no* copyright claim to the work, so how can you limit public domain to just one country? And even if you could, any citizen of that country could then grant the right to use the work to anyone outside the country anyways. If they couldn't, it wouldn't be public domain, but a licensed work instead. I guess I'm missing something here...
