BIOS Concepts

The BIOS initiative is designed to forge a new commons in enabling technology for biological innovations.

BIOS will:
• explore and adapt new inclusive IP sharing mechanisms,
• articulate and promulgate public-good norms in biological technologies, commission new democratising technologies and
• promote new standards of utility in enabling technology.

BIOS will intervene with salient policy initiatives to increase fairness in access to the tools of innovation as a fundamental human right, it will acquire, commission and distribute inventions under new, public-good binding licenses and contracts to ensure the insulation of the new body of technology from appropriation.

The name, Biological Innovation for Open Society, was chosen carefully to indicate what BIOS is not as much as what it is.

BIOS is not simply a 'biotechnology' initiative, although that is one of the first points of intervention, because the opportunities are so great, and the impediments to wise use so pronounced.

Rather, all forms of 'Biological Innovation' ranging from plant and animal breeding, crop husbandry and protection, agronomy, genetic and natural resource conservation, management and use, medical and public health interventions and environmental remedies are similarly constrained by the technology options available to often disenfranchised user groups.

'Open Society' is a goal that is reflected in the BIOS institutional philosophy and in a desire for a self-correcting community of problem solvers, whether in public or private sector.

There must be an essential distinction between the tools of innovation, and the products of innovation.

This critical distinction will be a moving target, will be difficult and contentious, but it must be engaged. The implications for the impacts of exclusionary IP regimes in tools and their use (analogous to operating systems, programming languages and standards of interoperability) or in their applications (analogous to product lines or service relationships in software companies) are very different. This distinction is critical to forge an acceptable compromise and common purpose with proprietary thinking as reflected by much of the business community involved in biological technology use. This very distinction is also at the heart of the acceptance and indeed promotion of Linux and other Open Source software by many powerful and influential corporations in IT.

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