That is great news Sam! This is really exciting to see an incubator starting it's own research lab and on top of that, keeping it totally in the open source. I'm fascinated by Research work folks have done at Parc and Disney, you should have a look here and perhaps speak with someone at Disney as well: http://www.disneyresearch.com

Just curious, are you going to also have people filing grant proposals (with government agencies, etc), as an avenue of additional funding?

Well, I hope you are taking interns

And I hope you guys really do make the next Bell Labs :)