Open source systems are penetrating into many sectors, producing a renewal and redefinition of the practices of large private companies and major research institutions in the name of a less hierarchical and most innovative knowledge. The open source perspective should now break into the world of culture as well.
The outlook for the development of open systems is much more optimistic in those areas, such as scientific communication, in which the use of scarce economic resources must necessarily be as conscious and controlled as possible.
The adoption of an open developmental model provides different benefits, such as: lower costs for applications and technologies; a better sustainability of the projects; sharing resources with other individuals or institutions; ease the reuse of data already processed and integrated with good and well conceived methodologies; enhance the investment in human resources rather than in hardware (Blender Render Farm).
Only in this way, in the future, we will still be able to talk about research and progress, moving from a situation in which culture and resources are limited to few people to a utopistic condition, of course in a positive sense, in which the scientific community and knowledge are available to everyone. In this regard, Cineca is a partner of the Network of Excellence VMust, DGXIII funded by the European project, which has begun in February 2011 for a duration of four years.
