Software freedom as an academic motivator 50 years of the Research Institute of Geodesy, Topography and Cartography SOFTWARE FREEDOM AS AN ACADEMIC MOTIVATOR

The development of Free Software is a well established and successful phenomenon which could hardly exist without the Internet, where groups of programmers scattered all around the world are developing software. The idea of Free Software is highly attractive to talented creative students and can stimulate and support their profesional activities. The GNU Gama [4] for adjusting of geodetic networks, with input data described in XML, is given here as a concrete example. Free Software [3] (or Open Source) projects need not be limited to software development but can generally cover any professional project based on free information exchange; a suggested example is the planned collection of model geodetic networks described in XML