Toward Collaborative Open-Source Technology Transfer

We analyze several occurrences of open-source technology transfer where research tools or prototypes developed in academic environments are transferred to private actors to be exploited economically. We enlight common characteristics which lead us to suggest that academic duality is a general consequence of the academic design of research tools and prototypes, and that the associated high transfer costs could be reduced first by implementing dual versioning using a dual licensing scheme, by associating a new academic public license with a traditional technology transfer one, and second through the transparent and shared maintenance of products built according to a dual architecture, as it would be precisely allowed by a dedicated collaborative development platform such as LibreSource.