International Characters has the mission to make the world's fastest XML software engine and to work with a network of partners to provide an extended family of high performance XML products in a variety of application areas. Our engine and many products in this extended family will be available as open source software. International Characters will also offer commercial licenses to its engine and products throughout its extended family. Our goal is that International Characters be a one-stop shop for all your licensing and support needs in highest-performance XML software applications.

Changing the way the world does text!

International Characters is an SFU spin-off company founded to commercialize the high-speed XML/Unicode/text processing technology resulting from the research of Prof. Rob Cameron using a patentleft business model. Our motto is "free for open source, everyone else pays."

Our technology delivers dramatic performance improvements based on the representation of character data using parallel bit streams and the processing of these bit streams using the SIMD (single-instruction multiple-data) capabilities of current and developing commodity processors.

Guidelines for Software Contributions to International Characters

International Characters follows the policies described below for in-licensing contributions and for out-licensing open source software. When distributing actual software, International Characters applies the license terms of the open source licenses identified below, namely the Academic Free License (AFL 3.0, www.rosenlaw.com/AFL3.0.htm) and the Open Software License (OSL 3.0, www.rosenlaw.com/OSL3.0.htm).

International Characters believes that the authors of computer software should retain ownership of their copyrights and patents for their own purposes. That is why we ask only that contributors *license* their software to us under the Academic Free License (AFL 3.0), not that they assign or transfer any other rights to our company. Contributors retain their intellectual property rights for any other purposes they wish, while International Characters will be licensed to use those contributions for its larger open source projects and commercial products.

International Characters is a technology spin-off based on research work carried out at Simon Fraser University. We host our open source software through SFU's Centre for Open Software Technology and Applications Research (COSTAR).

International Characters is a technology development company based on a new and unique business model that combines an open source philosophy with a principled approach to patent-based protection of intellectual property.

Fundamentally, International Characters is about open technology development. Rather than rely on proprietary development of trade-secret technologies kept to ourselves, we seek to develop technologies in open collaboration with others. We develop and publish software technology as open source software under Open Software License 3.0. We document and publish technology concepts as research publications under a Creative Commons License. We actively seek technology partners who will work with us in developing commercial applications of open technologies.

Company patent policy is founded on the principle that patent rights ought to be exercised in the context of a fair deal that maximizes mutual benefit to the inventor and the public. In exchange for a grant of exclusive rights to our actual discoveries, we commit to promoting the progress of science and useful arts.