Following years of successful research and piloting of collaboration services, on March 31, 1999, The MITRE Corporation made its Collaborative Virtual Workspace (CVW) software publicly available as Open Source.

CVW's release as Open Source stimulates collaboration research and fosters the creation of commercial place-based, persistent, computer-mediated collaboration products. The competitive market that the Open Source project is intended to create serves MITRE's sponsors by creating commercially available, affordable and supportable products based on MITRE's research and piloting.

MITRE will moderate software integration, review code contributions and publish new versions of the core code base, maintain a Web site to support CVW as a research project, and stimulate technology transfer and collaboration research. Already, approximately 9,000 copies of the CVW source code have been downloaded from the Web site. Of the software recipients who identified themselves, 17 percent were from commercial entities.

Several companies are leveraging CVW for their commercial products in different ways, such as providing training for CVW, deploying and supporting CVW, using CVW as an environment for continuing research of collaborative systems, and using CVW as a proof of concept.

As a user and integrator of multiple collaboration environments, MITRE is working closely with its sponsors and commercial corporations to create standards, bridges, and gateways—in general, interoperability—among collaboration tools.

For more information, please contact Rob Leslie using the employee directory.