It's official! I am very pleased to announce that Northrop Grumman Corporation has purchased the intellectual property of Tucana Technologies, Inc., to include the Tucana Knowledge Server and associated patents, copyrights and trademarks. There is a major new Semantic Web company in town.
Northrop quietly pre-announced the purchase to some of its big customers at SWANS in April, but the deal wasn't officially closed at that time.
Northrop has decided to continue development of TKS and to release a new version sometime in the future. We are still discussing feature sets, licensing and schedule, so don't bother to ask me yet. I'll post it here when I can.
The purchase also included the copyright to Kowari. Stunningly for a company their size, Northrop has not only agreed to support Kowari but rushed to do so. I certainly didn't expect a US federal systems integrator to "get" Open Source Software, but times have clearly changed. Their senior managers have made a legitimate effort to figure out the licensing and how to make it work within their business model. I have confidence that we can figure out a way to make it work for both the Kowari community and Northrop Grumman.
Northrop and Tucana plan to come out with press releases shortly. I'll post the links when they are up.
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