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Comment by StefanKarpinski | Hacker News Reader

This is an awful lot of fanfare for the open sourcing of something that was funded with public money by the government of Australia, using open source tools and technologies. Why isn't it already open source?

In general, I would like to see more software developed with public research funding required to be open source as part of the grant stipulation, ideally from early on. Too often tax-payer money is used to develop software which then ends up being closed source and providing profit to some commercial entity, instead of benefiting, you know, the people who payed for it – the public.

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Why isn't it already open source?

Not sure if you are Australian or not, but - unlike the in the US - in Australia there is no assumption that publicly funded work will be in the public domain.

Generally the way it works here is that bodies like Nicta (and CSIRO) are expected to make a return on the investments that are made in them - ie, they are expected to make money somehow. The default way they do that is generally IP licensing.

Personally I think this is very short sighted, but it shouldn't surprise anyone.

This is why one of the best computational algebra softwares magma is only available for absurdly high prices, even though was developed as an academic project.

Yeah, Magma has some of the fastest known eimplementations of some esoteric algorithms. A lot of the core Sage guys seem keen on catching up to Magma, though, particularly originator William Stein who sort of decided to start Sage when his Magma license was taken away for political, not commercial reasons.

Just a little bit more on this: NICTA was originally set up as a research group by the Australian Government with the explicit mandate of commercialising its research.

The OKL4 and seL4 microkernels developed by NICTA were commercialised through the company Open Kernel Labs, which was subsequently acquired by General Dynamics (who thus acquired the IP of both projects).

At NICTA, we are very happy to see seL4 finally being open sourced: we really do want to see our work be used as widely as possible, and open sourcing it is going to be the best way of this happening. (So, in response to the grandparent thread, that is why we are making a big fanfare: we are excited, even if nobody else is.)

Will there be future work with Genode, e.g. is the codebase going to stay focused on ARM or will it also support x86?

http://genode.org/documentation/articles/genode-on-okl4

The seL4 kernel currently supports the ARMv6, ARMv7 and x86 architectures, though the proof only applies to ARMv6.

I am not sure what Genode's plans are. seL4 is a different kernel to OKL4, with a substantially different API, so it will be quite some work to move it across from OKL4 to seL4.

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