---
title: Giving The Public What They Pay For
osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2017/program/proposals/358
beginning: '2017-10-07T14:00:00.000-07:00'
end: '2017-10-07T14:50:00.000-07:00'
presenters:
- name: Paul Berg
  affiliation: Paul W Berg Consulting
  osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/users/309
  gravatar_id: 1592dd3d80fe3ea6dc2b557ab59da458
  biography: Paul Berg is an independent consultant specializing in software licensing.
    He has served as Idaho National Laboratory’s senior research and development software
    licensing manager where he drove the software release strategy for the lab. Before
    coming to INL in 2016, he was a senior open source and software engineer at Amazon.com,
    helping lead the team that designed the logistics strategies and algorithms for
    Amazon’s shipping and delivery systems, and design and drive Amazon’s Open Source
    strategy. As a senior software development engineer at Microsoft, he was in charge
    of pioneering the Office Genuine Advantage system, as well as collaborating on
    Windows and SQL Server development. He has led or collaborated on projects that
    have resulted in 16 patents. He worked extensively with merger and acquisition
    diligence in the technology field and is particularly interested in artificial
    intelligence research, programming language theory and intellectual property strategy.
---

The United States and other governments spend tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars per year funding research for the benefit of their own populations and of mankind. This research results in large amounts of software technology in bleeding edge areas that is ripe for development into disruptive products. However, much of this research is opaque and unavailable to the common software developer, being dished out to those parties known to have an interest in it rather than widespread dissemination and collaboration like the Open Source world enjoys.

Bringing modern Open Source practices into institutional research provides a better means of spreading, utilizing and commercializing these technologies and fulfilling the basic charters of these institutions. I have spent the last year and a half changing how government research interfaces with the Open Source world in order to take advantage of these new, superior models. I would like to share my tactics, my successes, my setbacks and my vision for where we are going and how it will change the world.
