Redmonk is an analyst firm that studies the Technology industry. One aspect of their work is publishing whitepapers on various technology subjects, which are usually sold for hundreds of dollars to companies seeking research. Tech magazine InfowWorld noticed their most recent publication was released for free, and on top of that, licensed under Creative Commons. Stephen O’Grady of Redmonk explains the reasoning behind the licensing in this post to his technology weblog. In a followup post, he sums up the paralells between Creative Commons licensed technology papers and open sourced code:

“I see no reason to believe that the open source model is any less applicable to our business model than it is to software. It’s not one-to-one, of course, because of the inherent differences between source code and analysis, but at the end of the day they are both just information. Information that can be used and built on. If you allow it.”

It’s great to see an analyst firm try out licensing their whitepapers, and I hope it’s the start of a new trend in the industry.