It has become necessary for scientists to educate the public funding agencies that OSS is here to stay, and that these agencies should endorse OSS so that researchers must release software funded by public grants under an accepted OSS license before the end of the grant[62]. This will benefit the public, help the peer-review scientific process and will not conflict with potential commercialization efforts such as those stipulated by the Bayh-Dole act[63].
This section will introduce some of the arguments for why this should be done, but for a more detailed look at these issues, please see the petition available at our companion website[64].
Even some national governments[65,66] and federal organizations[67] are beginning to see proprietary software as an unnecessary drain of capital and also see OSS as a way of cheaply distributing high technology to their population, and as an instrument of assuring national security. For example, the National Security Agency recently released a publicly available, highly secure version of Linux[68] and will base further research on hardening the computing infrastructure on OSS.