Nigeria has to move away from the Get Rich at the Expense of the Poor syndrome that has plagued many western corporations who continually siphon wealth from Nigeria to their countries. We want to promote home grown software built by Nigerians for Nigerians with wealth creation remaining within the shores of Nigeria....But, as William Gibson reminds us, the future is here, it’s just not well-distributed yet. The answer to our problems is not to redistribute wealth, it’s to redistribute the future. In very practical terms, that’s what open source is about....When intellectual problems become distributed, the search for solutions becomes collaborative and the research agenda is driven not by multinational shareholders but by the passions of the participants, you get not just better results, you get different results.
The South-South scientific coalition is a sign that a few countries at least - namely Brazil, South Africa and India - get this. They’re working together, trying to educate more local scientists and allying themselves with open and non-commercial approaches, like the open access movement in scientific publishing (which demands that scientific papers be made freely available online, not published in expensive, limited-circulation hardcopy journals), precisely because they recognize that this makes possible a different kind of science. It makes possible a scientific research agenda based on what their people need, not on what will make Monsanto the most money....[T]here’s something very wrong with a world in which crops, energy systems, essential drugs, access to information, methods for providing clean water, and so on are priced outside the reach of billions simply because of the legacy of past development patterns. They are proprietary knowledge.
The greatest strength of the open source model is that it is explicitly non-proprietary. It is a direct antidote to legacy ownership of key ideas, because the core concept is that no one should own core concepts. No corporation, no nation, no person can claim ownership over the core concepts in an open source project in order to demand royalties or restrict its use. No one using OS-built medicines, for example, would ever die of AIDS because some Big Pharma executive in New York or Berlin decided that distributing cheap drugs was too great a risk to their patents.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/11/2006 07:43:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
