MIT Media Lab Goes Open Source, And Doesn’t Forget To FLOSS

The MIT Media Lab, a tech innovation center that has has a hand in numerous tech related products over the years, including Guitar Hero has revealed that going forward, the way it deals with its approach to software releases is to fundamentally change.

From now on, the MIT Media Lab will release its software via FLOSS: (Free Libre Open-Source Software)

The move was announced by Media Lab director, Joi Ho, in a blog post last weekend:

“I’m proud to announce that we are changing our internal procedures to encourage more free and open-source software.”

Ho hopes that by changing the way they they approach software, it will allow students to free up the code they write so there will be no need for approval from either internal or external administrative hurdles.

In doing so, Ho argues that this will align MIT more closely with its core altruistic academic values, that in essence asserts that knowledge should be shared, tested, and externally validated by its peers.

“Previously, software releases using free and open source licenses were approved by an internal committee. But since we’ve always allowed our developers to open-source their work, we’re eliminating the unnecessary hurdle: from now on any open source request will be viewed as the default and automatically approved….“We respect the autonomy of our community members and will continue to let them choose whether to release their software as proprietary or open. But removing the open source approval step will level the playing field.”

MIT Media Lab’s announcement was met with a positive response from the online community, especially from supporters and advocates of free and open-source software in general, such as the free OS, Linux, and its variants.