NOT the Majority Opinion

An excellent example of how a top public University can cooperate with top industries to promote research with the interest of the public in mind.

In a bold effort to revolutionize Internet service technology, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are teaming up with Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems to launch a new Internet research laboratory on the campus. The three companies will provide $7.5 million over five years to fund research at the Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed systems laboratory, or the RAD Lab, UC Berkeley researchers announced on Dec. 15. RAD Lab researchers will focus on developing alternatives to traditional software engineering, which follows a "waterfall" model of development. In such a traditional system, work is completed in orderly stages starting from system concept to development, assessment or testing, deployment and operation. Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are considered foundation members of the RAD Lab, each donating to it an average of $500,000 per year. Along with additional smaller contributions from other affiliated companies, the research laboratory is expected to receive as much as 80 percent of its support from industry.

The researchers emphasized that any software and applications emerging from the RAD Lab will be made freely and openly available to the public, with source code distributed using the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license. "We are following in the grand tradition of Berkeley engineering, as with Berkeley's BSD Unix operating system, in making our innovations freely available and unencumbered for research and possible commercialization in source code form," said Katz.

The founders emphasized that making this research as widely and openly available as possible will maximize the impact of the work, and so further the reputation of the university in its mission to create new industries and new jobs. "Another reason companies are supporting the RAD Lab is to help UC Berkeley continue to produce new generations of young leaders in information technology," said Katz. Representatives from the companies will act as consultants and provide advice for the center's participants, but they will not work at the RAD Lab.

More information on the RAD Lab can be found at: http://radlab.cs.berkeley.edu.