Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, September 29, 2007

MIT and HP transfer DSpace copyright to DSpace Foundation

From yesterday's joint announcement by MIT, Hewlett-Packard, and the DSpace Foundation:

...It's now seven years since HP and MIT first collaborated to create the initial version of DSpace.  Since then, further developments by HP, MIT and a significant constituency of contributors have refined, added to and improved that initial version. DSpace has been widely adopted by the research library community worldwide so that DSpace is  the leading open-source institutional repository systems in use today.

In 2006 HP and MIT convened an advisory board comprised of representatives from organizations who were using or developing DSpace.  This group recommended that an independent not-for-profit organization, the DSpace Foundation, be established to continue to promote and develop the DSpace system on behalf of the user community. This year, HP and MIT have set up the DSpace foundation for this purpose.

As a result of the size and complexity the Dspace codebase has now acquired, as well as the significant DSpace user constituency, both HP and MIT now feel that it is time to pass over stewardship of the DSpace codebase to the new DSpace Foundation so that the Foundation can support the ongoing development of the code and seek funding that will be necessary to implement enhancements in the future. Both HP and MIT are still heavily involved as board members of the foundation, and both organizations are actively working to enhance the DSpace platform through code contributions and research.

As the joint owners of all copyright in Dspace, HP and MIT have transferred all copyright to the Dspace Foundation to enable it to achieve these aims. The code remains under the BSD license and the Foundation will ensure the code continues to be open-source and freely available....