The IP Penny Begins to Drop

The news that 12 US universities have adopted a series of guiding principles to facilitate collaborative research on open source software really shouldn't be news. The principles simply state that to accerate work in this area, intellectual property (IP) created by such collaborations should be made freely available for use in open source projects. Pretty obvious really: no free sharing, no free software.

But what is interesting about this (aside from the fact that it even needing stating) is the way that it throws up the stark opposition between IP and open source: they simply do not mix. As a consequence, the continuing (and ineluctable) rise of free software means that IP will be increasingly under attack, and shown for what it really is: a greedy attempt to enclose the intellectual commons.