ImageWare System, Inc. announced today the formation of the Open Biometrics Initiative for the advancement of biometrics technologies in the open source community.
“The goal of the Open Biometrics Initiative sponsored by ImageWare is to advance the current state of the art and product by releasing certain elements of ImageWare’s technology as open source for closer collaboration with the public, private and academic sectors while still maintaining all of our other proprietary technology,” ImageWare CEO Jim Miller said.
The first code to be released into the Open Biometrics Initiative is OpenEBTS. It’s an application programming interface for the management of Electronic Biometric Transmission Specification data. The EBTS standard was created and is managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and it’s used by government agencies for the management of biometric data.
So far the Open Biometrics Initiative SourceForge account contains just one pdf, but no actual code.
So why does ImageWare want to open source their code?
“ImageWare will gain access to the open source communities contributions to advance our technology faster and cheaper than we could achieve through internal resources,” Miller said. “In addition, as our open source user community expands, the size of the potential market which can benefit from proprietary extensions to our open source technology also expands.”
We’ll see.
