Coming soon: IRILL

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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 ...