Janet Hope’s impressive thesis, worth a read!
Open Source Biotechnology Project: “What is Open Source Biotechnology?
Dramatic recent expansion of intellectual property protection for biotechnology research tools has led to concerns that future innovation will be blocked unless action is taken to preserve access to, and freedom to operate with, those tools that are important for further research and development.
Open Source licensing is a style of intellectual property management that has evolved in the past half-decade out of the Free Software movement, initiated in the early 1980s in response to restrictive copyright licensing practices adopted by commercial software developers. The Open Source approach seeks to preserve ongoing community access to proprietary software 4k tools without precluding or discouraging commercial involvement in their development.
‘Open Source Biotechnology’ refers to the possibility of extending the principles of commerce-friendly, commons-based peer production exemplified by Open Source software development to the development of research tools in biomedical and agricultural biotechnology.”