It is today the 25th anniversary of the Free Software Foundation, and we are all quite happy, here at IRILL, that we start our activities on this very date, with the IRILL Days.

It has been a long way for Free Software, from the very first definition of Free Software licences, then the uptake of the Free Software phylosophy and the acceleration of the development made possible by the generalisation of the Internet, and finally the main inroads made by Free and Open Source software in all areas of IT, even in companies that considered Free Software pure evil just a few years ago.

At IRILL, we believe it is now time to make some extra steps: research on Free Software, especially on how to master code complexity, education to and with Free Software, and setting up ecosystems mixing academia, communities and industries.

This is our mission for the next years.

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{.image-inline .c4}Just after the Open World Forum, the OSI board meeting will take place in Paris, on the IRILL premises. It will be one more occasion to foster collaboration between researches, developers, communities, industries and educators on Free and Open Source Software, which is the mission of IRILL.

{.image-inline .c4}In the opening session of the IRILL Days, on October 4 and 5, we are honoured to welcome Georg Greve, founder of FSF Europe, and Karsten Gerloff, the current president of FSFE. FSFE has done an important work defending Free Software in Europe, and continues doing so. It has also collaborated with various academic actors in the framework of some european projects.

{.image-inline .c4}Many of us are going to participate to the GTLL plenary meeting, on September 15th, hosted by University of Paris 6.

There will be also a short presentation of IRILL. One can register here.

On October 4th and 5th 2010, IRILL hosts the first edition of IRILL Days, on the Inria premises, at the 5th floor of 23, Avenue d'Italie, Paris.

This event sports a rich program, with presentations by researchers working on FOSS, developers and industries, as well as community representatives, and quite a few networking opportunities on IRILL topics.

It will be the first public event of IRILL, and it's open to everybody. We just ask you to register in advance, due to limited space availability.

You want to be informed of what is going on at IRILL? You can of course add our RSS feed to your favourite reader, but you can also subscribe to the IRILL Newsletter, which is now up and running!

{.image-inline .c4}A presentation of the philosophy behind IRILL, and some of the first concrete actions done in the framework of this initiative will be given in a keynote of the Open World Forum in Paris, on September 30th 2010.

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Free Software is a disruptive phaenomenon: free redistribution of the software, free access and modification of the source code, and collaborative developement are in total opposition to the highly restrictive practices that have dominated the software industry for decades.

Free Software is designed, developed, maintained, distributed, marketed, and used in ways that are radically different from those that were customary just a few years ago.

Free Software poses new challenges that must be addressed to allow Free Software communities, developers, industries, and users to collaborate effectively on code bases whose size, variety and complexity are mind-boggling.

A first class of challenges are scientific. The Free Software code base grows at an astonishing pace, and managing its complexity is no longer possible without new research breakthroughs and the developement of advanced tools; as an example, one can consider the number of software packages in Debian, a widely used GNU/Linux distribution made by volunteers, which skyrocketed from a few hundreds in 1994 to 30.000 in 2010; or the number of Eclipse plugins, that is counted in the thousands today.

A second class of challenges is posed by education. As brilliantly stated by D. Patterson we can no longer be contented with engineers that are trained by teaching them only to write code from scratch on their own; we need to develop a new curriculum, fully leveraging the new possibilities that Free Software offers, and this will require a significant effort.

A third class of challenges is to adapt the traditional technology transfer process to the Free Software ecosystem, where strategies based on per copy licence fees are no longer pertinent.

IRILL is a research and innovation initiative that will contribute to address all these challenges.

IRILL is coming soon!

stay tuned on this blog ...

IRILL is a federated initiative for Research and Innovation on Free Software.

It is being founded in the Paris area by a major french academic and innovation player in ICT, INRIA, together with the universities Paris Diderot (Paris 7) and Pierre-and-Marie Curie (Paris 6).

Its goal is to foster breakthrough innovation in Free Software by bringing together researchers that are ready to delve into the intricacies of real-world issues exposed by Free and Open Source Software projects; academics that are ready to experiment with innovative ways to train IT engineers; software developers that are open to discuss the limitation of the available tools with researchers, and engineers from innovative IT industries that are open to experiment with new technology transfer processes.

Led by Roberto Di Cosmo, IRILL will start its activities in the last trimester of 2010, by hosting a first group of research projects that are already ongoing, among which the most visible ones focus on

• developing theory and tools to manage collateral evolutions in large code bases (like the Linux kernel, see the Coccinelle project, already used by several Linux kernel developers)

• developing thery and tools to manage the configuration and evolution of complex software systems built out of coarse-grained components, like the GNU/Linux distributions, or the Eclipse plugin collections (see the Mancoosi project, that is providing revolutionary tools to manage complex software systems assembled by selecting packages out of package repositories).

In the first year, IRILL activities will be centered around existing collaborations, which involve a majority of french actors, as well as a few european partners from Italy, Belgium, Denmark and Portugal, but a specific effort will be devoted to networking and communication, to prepare a second phase in which connections will be actively established with new partners from all over the world.