The Institute for Signal and Information Processing (ISIP) was created in 1994 with a simple vision to develop public domain software:

http://www.cavs.msstate.edu/research/isip/projects/speech/index.html

Key differentiating characteristics of this project are:

• Public Domain: unrestricted software (including commercial use); no copyrights, licenses, or research-only restrictions.
  
  
• Increase Participation: competitive technology plus application-specific toolkits reduce start-up costs.
  
  
• "GNU For DSP": what better model?
  
  
• Lasting Infrastructure: Support, training, education, dissemination of information are priorities.

Our plan over the next five years is to broaden our offerings into the areas of natural language processing and information retrieval.