Abstract (100 words or less): |  | The Computational Infrastructure for Operation Research (COIN-OR) is a initiative to promote the use and development of open-source software in the Operations Research community. In this talk, we explain *what* is open-source software and describe the elements ofthis open source library, *why* IBM spearheaded the COIN-OR initiative (and continues to support it today), and *how* the open-source software freely available on COIN-OR is being used by companies, universities, and researchers. As of November, 2004 COIN-OR has been managed by the nonprofit COIN-OR Foundation, Inc and is on-line at www.coin-or.org. |