Technology transfer in computer science

Technology transfer in computer science refers to the transfer of technology developed in computer science or applied computing research, from universities and governments to the private sector. These technologies may be abstract, such as algorithms and data structures, or concrete, such as open source software packages.

Examples

Notable examples of technology transfer in computer science include:

Year of transfer	Technology	Field(s)	Originally developed at	Transfer method(s)	Commercialised at	Patented	Used by
c. 1964	BASIC	Programming languages	Dartmouth College	Freeware	Computer manufacturers and others	No	Numerous BASIC dialects
1974 (Internet Protocol published) 1992 (interconnection)	The Internet	Computer networking The Internet	Advanced Research Projects Agency	RFC 1992 law permitting commercial interconnection	Numerous companies	No	Millions of web sites and other internet properties
1981	KMS	Hypertext	Carnegie Mellon University	Spin-out	Knowledge Systems	No	?
1984	MATLAB	Programming languages Scientific computing Numerical computing	University of New Mexico [1]	Incorporation and rewrite [1]	MathWorks	No (original) Yes (from 2001) [2]	Millions of users
c. 1985	HyperTIES	Hypertext	University of Maryland [3]	Licensing [3]	Cognetics Corporation	?	Union Carbide, Hewlett-Packard, others [4]
1990 (initial software) 1994 (Netscape) [5]	World Wide Web	Hypertext World Wide Web	CERN	Unfettered use (no patents) Consortium (to create recommended standards)	Netscape and others	No	Millions of web sites
1991	Gopher	Computer networking The Internet Information retrieval	University of Minnesota	RFC Freeware	Numerous companies	No	Numerous Gopher sites
1998	PageRank	Information retrieval World Wide Web Algorithms	Stanford University	Spin-out	Google	Yes	Google Search
2004 (software) 2011 (incorporation)	Scala	Programming languages Object-oriented programming	École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne	Open source	Typesafe Inc. and others	?	Play, Akka and others
2013	CRDTs	Distributed computing	INRIA and others	?	Basho Technologies [6]	No	Riak [6]

References

1. Moler, Cleve (2004). "The Origins of MATLAB". Mathworks.com. Retrieved 19 November 2014.
2. "Patents". Mathworks.com. Retrieved 19 November 2014.
3. "Hypertext Research: The Development of HyperTIES". Human Computer Interaction Lab. University of Maryland. Retrieved 22 November 2014.
4. "Cognetics History". Cognetics Corporation . Retrieved 22 November 2014.
5. Lasar, Matthew (11 October 2011). "Before Netscape: the forgotten Web browsers of the early 1990s". Ars Technica . Retrieved 22 November 2014.
6. "Introducing Riak 2.0: Data Types, Strong Consistency, Full-Text Search, and Much More". Basho Technologies. 29 October 2013. Retrieved 29 November 2014.