The Inria consortia model for open source software takes pride of place at the first B-Boost convention
Date:
Changed on 24/04/2020
Organised by Aquinetic, the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region's skills cluster in free software and technologies, this convention will welcome a number of French digital technology stakeholders and speakers from more than 10 different countries. Over two days, visitors will be able to learn and develop their activities thanks to over 70 conferences, around 30 innovative stakeholders, B-to-B meetings and events (hackathon, boost run, etc.).
Among the renowned speakers Nicolas Roussel, director of the Inria Bordeaux - Sud-Ouest research centre, Algiane Froehly, head of development at the MMG consortium and Gaël Guennebaud, who developed Eigen software, will be representing Inria - the French national research institute dedicated to the digital sciences.
For many years, the institute has been a major stakeholder in free software, with contributions taking various forms:
Through its work, Inria has therefore developed a global expertise on free software - an object for scientific dissemination, technology transfer and industry.
Eigen
Gaël Guennebaud is the co-founder and main software maintainer of Eigen, a generic (template) C++ library for linear algebra aimed at developers. Since its creation in 2008, Eigen has been immensely successful in both the academic and start-up worlds, and with leading industrialists (EDF, CEA, CERM, Google, etc.). The website has more than 70,000 unique visitors per month.
When Eigen was created, the decision was made to implement a very open development model: everyone can participate in Eigen's enrichment. The advantages were a strong commitment from the user community which led to a very rapid dissemination of the project. Today, in view of its success, the question arises of creating a consortium based on the MMG model in order to perpetuate a software program that currently relies on very few people.
The MMG platform
Developed jointly by Inria, the University of Bordeaux, engineering graduate school Bordeaux INP, Pierre and Marie Curie University and the CNRS, the MMG platform provides applications and libraries for mesh modifications. Since 2004, its user community has constantly increased, ultimately raising the question of the perpetuation of the software programs.
Algiane Froehly has worked on the industrialisation of MMG, then on the study of the potential economic models to support the platform engineers' needs. This work led to the MMG open source consortium managed, among others, by the consortium's members. Today, the support and involvement of the industry and academic members of the consortium are the driving forces in promoting the platform and reflect a new dimension - provided by the consortium - in the relationships between researchers, developers and users.
Find out more about the MMG platform
Even though each consortium has to build its own economic model, many needs (legal, financial, engineering expertise, etc.) are shared. These resources can therefore be pooled. The InriaSoft initiative provides expertise and resources adapted to the software project leaders, whose user communities wish to invest financially via an open source consortium.
Today, a number of software projects created by our researchers are distributed under an open source licence and unite a community that is academic as well as industrial.