IRILL - Research and Innovation on Free Software 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.