Slashdot Mirror
Google and Oregon Launch Open Source Initiative
* * Beatles-Beatles tells us that Google is entering into a $350,000 joint open source technology venture with both Oregon State and Portland State Universities. From the article: "With the grant, the universities will collaborate to encourage open source software and hardware development, develop academic curricula and provide computing infrastructure to open source projects worldwide. The universities will also help provide a bridge between Oregon's universities and Oregon's growing open technology industry." Google also has their version of the announcement on blogspot.
Open Source Hardware
Seems they share schematics for the design. I'd imagine you could sell the hardware for profit (binaries) so long as you made the schematics (source code) available to those who bought it. Seems like a reasonable idea.
Open hardware is like open source; it's about designs, schematics, PCB layouts, FPGA codes, etc. There are several existing open hardware projects at Portland State, notably Portland State Aerospace Society's rockets and a Software-Defined Radio project built on the open-hardware Universal Software Radio Peripheral. More are expected.
Interestingly, Slashdot had a Google story 22 times since Oct 1. Yahoo had 3 times and Linux 21 times.
MS has long offered subsidised software to capture hearts and minds to schools. For years and years. Apple has, too. Go to local computer store, note MS retail prices, then check colleges discounts prices. They do the same with libraries, etc as well. And when they lost the anti trust case,(while still maintaining the monopoly OS install in most mainstream vendors retailed computers for some reason...) the so called "fine" was to subsidise software at free or cheap to schools mostly. I mean, really....google dropping 350 thou on encouraging open source is a joke compared to what MS has dropped.