Barrier: Licensing.

In any community effort, that includes multiple developers and consumers of software 
technology, the issues of intellectual property and terms of use can either hinder or 
accelerate the collaborative process. In the visualization research community, it is 
generally agreed that Open Source licenses promote the use of software technology. 
In the usual interpretation of Copyright law in the US, only the author, or copyright 
holder, has legal authority to grant terms of use in the form of a license, whether 
it be an Open Source license or not. By Open Source license, we mean one of the 
license defined as being "Open Source" by the Open Source Foundation 
(http://www.opensource.org/).

To overcome the licensing barrier, we are fortunate to have support of DOE to promote 
distribution of software under an Open Source license. Many within the DOE community 
have adopted use of a templatized, BSD-like license for software distribution. The BSD 
license imposes few restrictions upon the licensee, and is viewed as a very "friendly" 
Open Source license.

The issue of intellectual property ownership is much more difficult. If Jim writes 
code that Wes then contributes to, who "owns" the resulting work? Most Open Source 
projects typically require assignment of copyright by contributors to an author as 
a workaround to the IP ownership problem. Such an approach may not be realistic in 
the environment of DOE laboratories: by way of example, the University of California 
will likely not accede to assignment of IP under any circumstances. We can offer no 
solution to this barrier other than to make the declaration of an unresolved and 
potentially troubling issue.