Virginia Tech Licenses GenoCAD Source Code to ISCB

Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties, an affiliated corporation of
Virginia Tech, announced at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing that
it has licensed the source code of GenoCAD to the International Society
for Computational Biology (ISCB).



This agreement will facilitate the open source development of GenoCAD by the synthetic biology community.



"Our initial vision for GenoCAD was to develop a web site allowing
users to design synthetic genetic systems for biological research or
product development programs," said Jean Peccoud, associate professor
at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech. "GenoCAD has
become an open-source software development project after many users
expressed a strong interest for installing GenoCAD on their own
servers."



He added: "The partnership with the ISCB provides a framework allowing
developers from different institutions to collaborate toward the
development of a common code base without having to worry about
intellectual property issues."



Virginia Tech and ISCB have jointly determined that the system of
licensing agreements developed by the Apache Software Foundation
provides a suitable framework to distribute software, accept regular
contributions from individuals and corporations, and to accept larger
grants of existing software like GenoCAD.



"Open source licensing is an integral part of our technology transfer
strategy for pre-competitive software projects," said John Geikler,
Senior Licensing Associate with Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties.
"The partnership with ISCB allows contributors to retain full rights of
use for their software while providing the scientific community,
represented by ISCB, an irrevocable right to distribute and build upon
an open source code."



Scott Markel, ISCB Vice President and Chair of the Publications
Committee, remarked: "We are extremely pleased to enter into what we
see as a first-of-kind relationship between our organization and
academic institutions looking to galvanize a user and development
community for open source bioinformatics software. This type of
activity fits closely with the mandates of ISCB to facilitate the
dissemination of computational biology tools and develop a strong
computational biology community."

Further Information: http://www.vt.edu/