On Research Institutions and Corporate Interests

Stephen Cass dropped this into my submissions box last week, and he figured all of you might be interested in this editorial regarding research institutes, corporate interests and how this relationship may develop in the future. He writes, "Freely available software, developed by researchers, is good for science and keeps commercial companies on their toes. In an era of quasi-monopolies, research institutions should encourage it." Intrigued? Read the article below and think about ways in which we can answer this question: What can we do to we keep researchers in the Open Source community and not lose them (and their science) to the Corporate World where their breakthroughs will become another piece of "Intellectual Property"?

The following is an Editorial which appeared in the Jan. 20 issue of Nature Journal. Reprinted here with permission:

In Praise of Open Source Software

"Imagine how the Web might look today had it been invented by Microsoft and made proprietary, rather than at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), where it was made available free. Scientists tinkering with computers to create tools for their research for no profit have underpinned the computer revolution. The bounds of supercomputing are being pushed back by hugely demanding challenges, such as protein folding and the cosmos; many of the pioneers of the Internet are not Internet millionaires, but are still labouring in their laboratories.

The profit motive, and the investments that go with it, are often essential. The scrappy, early 'Mosaic' browser designed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois only took off when some of the scientists who invented it went on to set up Netscape. But the abuse of commercial monopolies is also too evident, with much of the world having been held hostage to the dismal operating system DOS for more than a decade.

This issue -- providing equitable access to all scientists and not just the richest -- is about to become critical as companies rush to build bioinformatic tools for genomics. Tools that add value to genome data are to be welcomed, but as the licensing strategy being adopted by Celera Genomics becomes clear, it gives new grounds for wariness. Unfortunately, restrictive material-transfer agreements are also becoming the rule even in publicly funded institutions. While academic research centres are an important cradle for industrial development, it is crucial that the not-for-profit motive should be respected when the needs of research communities are best served in this way.

The high cost of some journals has attracted enormous attention over the past few years, whereas the high cost of software and the often exorbitant licence charges have not. Most scientific software is proprietary, and beyond the reach of many poorer parts of the scientific community worldwide. All the more reason to be grateful, therefore, for the continuation of the open spirit in the tradition of Internet pioneers. Witness the group of Californian scientists developing sophisticated 'freeware' for DNA chip technology. The software, which users say compares favourably with costly commercial software, can be downloaded from the Web. Another example: scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Potsdam have made freely available a vast suite of plug-and-play tools, 'Cactus', that allows scientists from any discipline to use supercomputers without needing to know advanced computing techniques. A Japanese scientist is giving away E-Cell, a package that simulates basic cell processes. And so on.

The open-source movement has found its apogee in the Linux operating system developed by Linus Benedict Torvalds (see http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/~torvalds) as a 'hobby' -- which IBM last week decided to put at the core of its hardware plans. Because the code is not proprietary, it is being built on and debugged by an army of amateur developers worldwide, many of them academic scientists.

In short, amateur software developers are playing a key role in keeping systems open. But such activities need to be encouraged and professionalized by academic institutions; plans in France to create a research centre to provide bioinformatic tools for industrial and academic researchers build on the tradition of the Centre d'Etude du Polymorphisme Humain, the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information and the European Bioinformatics Institute. At a time when Microsoft looks as if it may be broken up (shades of AT&T) into 'Baby Bills', it would be ironic if science, and biology in particular, became a victim of new monopolies.

Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2000 Registered No. 785998 England.

Comments

The Funniest Line :)

[SgtPepper]

with much of the world having been held hostage to the dismal operating system DOS for more than a
decade.

DOS = Dismal Operating System *LMFAO* I love it....any bets on that being done intentionally?


Sgt Pepper
Lame Sig Shamelessly Ripped from
Fortune:

A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn.

Re:The Funniest Line :)

[zorgon]

Ahhhh, those were the days:
Dos 3.x, Desqview, Turbo Debugger AND Borland Turbo Fscking C!!!!! All running on an 8 MHz Z-286 with an ENTIRE 768 Kbytes of RAM. Man, I could do ANYTHING (up to 640K of course). With overlays! Until along came Excel, like the angel with the flaming sword barring the gates to Eden. And, that was the end of all that. Oh well: head for the Penguin, it'll be better than it was, and free, all free...

"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."

Patent issues in science .... (same old same old)

[taniwha]

Here is an article about the people working on the 'DNA gene chip' (really a sort of build-it-yourself open-source sequencing robot) - they are dealing with a lot of the 'patent everything in sight and sue' mentality we're having to deal with in te computer industry.

The main difference is that it's getting in the way of us making a living while in their case it's getting in the way of them doing basic research - like finding the cure for fatal diseases ....

A rather straightforward answer

[zyqqh]

Fund academia. It is that simple.

Intellectual property did not become a major issue until the first half of this century. It is not an accident that this coincident with the first shift of brainpower out of traditional academia and into for-profit corporations. Intellectual property did not become a top-priority issue until the past 2 decades, which coincided with a much greater shift of the same nature, due to the blooming of computer technology. For centuries before all this, science was concentrated in academia, where people pursued knowledge for the sake of knowledge, not for the sake of profit. The modern capitalist state discourages that to a large extent. While I don't advocate communism per se, it may be worthwhile to note that a disproportionate part of advances in science made in this century came from communist nations, where science did not have to depend on, or be subservient to, corporate interests. This goes for science in general just as well for any subset thereof.

I am not asking for a revolution. If there's one thing this century has taught us, it is that those are largely pointless. And that a free-market society is the best we have. What I ask for is that the free-market philosophy be limited when it comes to pursuit of knowledge. As long as universities prosper, we will see good research, which doesn't get hogged by some corporation, and which remains in the public domain for the good of mankind. If current trends continue, we'll see increasing brain drains, such as Microsoft's infamous raid on Carnegie Mellon's OS faculty (for those of you who haven't heard, they came, offered huge salaries, and basically left the CMU CS dept without any OS specialists), which will transfer brain power in the hands of those who cannot use it ethically simply because their primary goal is profit.

Unfortunately, academia requires a huge investment to maintain, since it does not naturally flourish under market forces; it is that investment that is needed to keep "intellectual property" out of the hands of those who want to "own" it. And it is that investment that needs to be made continually for research as we know it to survive.

Re:A rather straightforward answer

[wnissen]

The above post is so riddled with fallacy that I will just skim off the biggest ones. First, the real reason for the brain drain has been that universities are now allowed to hold and profit from patents. Before, they were not allowed, but in the 80s public universities were given the right to make profits. That is when the cost of sharing your idea with someone else became the risk that he or she would steal it and sell it. As long as academia is the realm of ideas, where giving your idea to someone else does not deprive you of it, then things work fine. When you depend on the profitability of your idea to fund your department, then you are in trouble.

However, this is not the same as not making a profit. Rather, companies need to let the basic research over the long term be done by people who don't have to profit. Then, after the groundwork is laid, the company can begin putting together products to sell. Does anyone believe that we would have given up ARPAnet if MS had invented and controlled the Web? Of course not, so MS, and everyone else who likes to embrace and extend research should not even bother.

Walt

P.S. 30 million people died of famine and disease in the nationalization of soviet farms. Please do not try to tell me that communism led to the same level of innovation shown by, say, Monsanto.

In the end

[jd]

The ONLY way to keep the majority of researchers working in a company-neutral fashion (eg: Open Source, or something similar) is if the benefits of doing so, FOR THEM, outweigh the benefits of going commercial.

A researcher's first priority has to be to their own well-being, and that of their family. So long as research is seen as a second-rate hobby, rather than as a serious occupation, it will remain extremely hard to find any entity, be it a University, a Research Lab, or whatever, that will pay for purely speculative work, whatever the field.

Second, there is the popular saying that "those who can, do, and those who can't, teach". This may have some truth to it, but researchers and lecturers are often the same people, simply because Universities tend to be the organisations best able to do open research. However, by being seen as one of those who can't, a researcher is going to have a much harder time trying to be taken seriously, unless they are -very- well-known and are working with a University that has a strong history of working with large corporations.

If society wants to preserve the notion of free and open research, genuine co-operation, and free exchanges of ideas, it HAS to find the cash to pay for it. Not only within Universities, but within privately-run, amateur research labs. I would like to see federal grants EQUAL to the pay normally given to mid-grade high-tech workers, given to all researchers not operating in the commercial sector.

IMHO, if information wants to be free for all, then all must be willing to chip in and make it so.

Re:In the end

[jd]

IBM and SGI are obviously heading in this direction, but they've still a long way to go, before they are doing genuinely open research.

The reason I'm thinking Government involvement is that they can cast a much wider net.

My thought would be for a system whereby you are given a, say, $70,000 (after tax) per year grant, no strings attached. All you'd need to do is produce a specification and a target userbase, with renewal of the grant subject to you providing a copy of the source, full documentation, an assessment as to how the target userbase has been affected, and a specification of what you plan to do next.

The idea would be to induce people to produce code which scratched an itch. If you can find an itch and scratch it, you'd get a livable grant. For people living in rural areas, or outside of the "technical hubs", this would provide a decent starting point to do a mix of pure and applied research, under conditions which -encourage-, rather than suppress, originality and creativity.

The issue is compensation

[Matt_Bennett]

I've worked for non-commercial research institutions for over eight years. After 8 years of bad politics and low pay, I'm jumping ship to private industry. Most of the researchers I know do it for the sheer love of intellectual growth. But you still have to pay the bills. In this time of great prosperity, the benefits of my job (health insurance and annual leave) have been reduced. I'm looking at a 20% increase in pay to use my skills for a company rather than a (state university connected) research institution.

What can we do to keep people in research? Make them feel worthwhile and deserved. Compensate them fairly with respect to their peers in private industry. If it can't be cash, improve their working environment or just plain treat them better. Understand the sacrifices we make to do what we love, and try and make it so we don't regret choosing to work in research.

Re:The issue is compensation

[qromo]

I wholeheartedly agree. Like you said, most scientists are more interested in the intellectual pursuits that their fields afford them than potential monetary gains. I once contemplated (and trained for) a career in physics and would have been quite happy to receive moderate pay and a nice, fat research budget without strings attached.

Unfortunately, there's a fundamental clash between money and research that usually ends up getting in the way. Most research costs quite a bit of money, which doesn't just come out of thin air. The public is more interested in seeing their hard earned tax dollars go to something more tangible (to them, at least) than scientific research, so government funding has declined over the years. Someone has to pony up the dough for researchers to do what they love, and the private sector's got loads of it.

There's also the internal politics of universities and such than can get in the way. They can be quite irratating, especially in a place that should ideally be apolitical. Having to put up with that AND a shrinking budget can be too much for many researchers to handle. At least in private industry they're likely to be paid well and have access to equipment they need to perform their research.

Anyways, I realized this while in school and decided to bail out of science. The prospect of working in private industry doesn't really appeal to me (as a researcher, anyways), and I don't want to end up stuck in a dull research position at some university where I have to scramble to get a measly few bucks for my research. Now I'm working for a software company, and though I know it's not what I really want to do, it is quite challenging, I enjoy it, and there's no ambiguity about what I'm here for: better cash for my trouble.

Dave

Public funding

[vlax]

The reason research institutions have traditionally felt free to give their tools, results and expertise away is because they were mostly publicly funded. No one (okay, almost no one) ever got rich doing science - it was a bit like the old Marxist cliché from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Once money is out of the picture, prestige becomes the measure of success, in part for the reasons so frequently outlined by Eric Raymond, but also because the only people in science who do get rich are high-prestige scientists who get book contracts, do the lecture circuit, and for the really lucky, get bit parts in TV shows like the Simpsons and Star Trek.

From that perspective, giving it all away makes a great deal of sense.

Now, governments are pushing universities and other research institutions to seek private funding and cut deals with profit-seeking companies for whom prestige is inevitably secondary to the bottom line. With the advent of the "dot-com" boom, researchers in biotech and anything related to computing or cognitive science have the potential to make a fortune quickly by keeping their knowledge secret; and as long as they cut their bosses in for even a small piece of the action, most universities and research institutes are glad to let them.

The traditional culture of science and research is breaking down, and without a return to substantially publicly funded research, open source ideas will stop coming out of those places. This has an impact far beyond mere software. Science can't function in secret and in the long run there is a real risk that the technological revolution of the past 300 years will slow down or come to an end.

I know that open source as a movement relies on all sorts of volunteers. It's likely that Linux and the GNU packages we've come to know and love can survive without a flow of new ideas from researchers, but there will be a lot of suffering without them.

DNA as IP

[Cool Hand Luke]

The sorry fact of the matter is that private funding for academic research rarely comes pro bono; usually some sort of tat-for-tit is involved where investors get first crack at looking at the results, at least.

What I find disturbing is the trend in biology where biotech companies are treating DNA more and more as a media for storing information rather than complex molecules. (I.E. copyrighting, patienting, and otherwise threating DNA as IP.) I'm wondering if this is unprecidented...

I'm also wondering if this is a problem of an engineering/science overlap. A company that builds a new kind of bridge can patient the bridge's design, but not the physics that make the structure work. I'm wondering if the patienting of DNA is analogous to patienting bridges (as far as the companies involved are concerned), or if this is stretch.

George Lee

A Call To University Hackers!

[exa]

Are you working on a research project at your University? Supposedly, you fit the description of the fundamental element of research at the University: "grad student", well or an "undergrad student". Perhaps, not even a student at that school.

In any case, you might be asked to develop software or other significant technologies that will be *hidden* from the public use, and made proprietary. It will be copyrighted, patented, and taken away. Your freedom will be banished; our freedom will be destroyed.

I invite all of you to review your purpose at University. Have you not come to make a scientific contribution to the people? Of course, you might be pursuing a proud career; and cannot wait for the day you will be cleared to arrive at the land of monetary rewards. The question is, will you give up the *faint* issue of freedom for a banana?

Talk to your supervisor, your instructor, your project manager and whom you must if it has to be dealt with. Tell them that you demand the project to be given away to the people which it was meant for. If it's software, put it on the net with a free license; if it's something else, work out a way to prevent it from being compromised. Advise them thoroughly the use and correctness of keeping things open and free. Give examples from the software world. There are lots of resources on how to conduct such advocacy.

When I asked RMS what students working on proprietary projects should do, he told strictly (along the lines of) "Ask your project manager to put it under GPL. Tell them that you will stop working if they don't." If you care about your freedoms as much as RMS does, do so. When necessary, take every measure you can.

Doing such will prove how much you are committed to the true spirit of University. I freed the project I worked on, (a medical comms&imaging lib) and so can you.

Happy Hacking!

Universities are getting more competitive

[omnifrog]

It used to be that universities would hold private everything they did until publication and then they almost gave it away. Today that is not the case. In many fields it seems as if jourals are becoming less about dissemination of information and more about bragging rights. A lot of papers that I've read recently seem to provide less how-to and more useless pictures of the final engineering experiment. They look good, but don't allow you to duplicate their work. Software is certainly not traded freely among universities. Once I was working on a project involving the use nonlinear system theory to predict a certain type of heartbeat abnormality. MIT is very good at this, so I contacted the professor who was working on the subject. He told be that I'd have to got through their Technology Licencing Office. The TLO wanted to charge me $300 and make me sign a whole stack of papers. But that is not the real problem. The real problem is that the TLO is set up to deal with *business*. As a researcher (at a top school), they still brushed me off. At 6 months, I gave up on the software. The problem is that MIT was set up to do business with large companies, and that was overshadowing basic research. Note: this is a corporate administrative thing, not the result of a professor's decision. Corporate relationships are making universities see each other as competitors for projects and patents. This is stiffling the openness of engineering programs, and ultimately makes us more reliant on companies for outside help. And the cycle continues ad. nausium.

A researcher's perspective

[Kaufmann]

I recently joined the staff of the Fluid Dynamics laboratory at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), a governmental institute (there exist few, if any, privately-funded research foci in Brazil). The salary is decent, but much lower than what I could be receiving at other places, doing less interesting things (even in a part-time job); most definitely, I (and most everyone else on the staff) don't do it for the money. The software we produce is heavily used such diverse areas as pipeline analysis by oil companies and cardiology; all these being very much vertical markets (and there not being that much research on fluid dynamics elsewhere), we _could_ license the software for a fortune and get rich.

But we don't - all our software is released under a Free (ais) license. Why not? First, because the aforementioned oil companies are the ones that provide for most of our funding in the first place; second, because just as I just finished integrating a GPL'd FFT package from another research institute into our codebase, other people elsewhere may as well find enough use for our software that they might modify it and improve it. In short, we all benefit from open scientific software. The same case can be made, I think, for open software in all other research fields. Maybe, in due time, these IP-friendly research corporations will understand this and adopt an open model as well, not only for software but for all other fruits of research.

(On a side note: right now the lab is still mostly a Sun/Solaris shop; we've got an old DEC box and a Big Mothahfuckah SGI, but we're progressively migrating to Linux. If the proposed law to enforce preferential use of Free Software in public institutions is passed, we'll probably end up as a Linux shop (except for the SGI, which still has at least a few years ahead of it). This shift is expected to save IMPA a six-digit figure in the next decade.)

Symbiosis

[Brett Glass]

A fragile symbiosis exists between academia and the corporate world.

Corporations spend millions to fund research programs which make scientific discoveries and develop new areas of knowledge. Why? Because, eventually, that knowledge will allow them to engineer products which make them money and benefit all of us.

To insist that corporations not use the fruits of that research is to destroy this carefully crafted win/win relationship. If this happens, corporations will form their own private research laboratories and pull their money out of academia. Education as well as research will suffer as a result.

Richard Stallman was ignorant of this delicate balance when he bridled against commercial spinoffs of the MIT AI Lab, such as Symbolics. (His two-year tantrum, in which he desperately tried to put Symbolics out of business by writing free equivalents of its software products, cost him the use of his hands; he developed RSI trying to keep up. The GPL, which Stallman designed to accomplish similar goals, is likewise ill-advised because it turns open source software into a weapon against commercial developers.)

Stallman's spite was, of course, misplaced. The very existence of the academic "sandbox" he enjoyed was due to funding from for-profit companies, and the AI Lab suffered and eventually died when its sponsors perceived that the relationship was no longer symbiotic.

Academic research labs are an artificial environment which is not self-sustaining. They are created explicitly to develop ideas, which means that rewards come from sharing information (publishing) rather than withholding it and from developing and proving the feasibility of new concepts. But they can't exist without support from the "real world" outside, in which intellectual property matters.

Instead of attempting to impose the values of one world upon the other (which hurts both), we must recognize the differences in the "rules" and the symbiosis that exists between the two. Open source is, in essence, an extension of the academic world. To begrudge the output of open source projects to commercial developers -- which is what the GPL does -- is ill advised and ultimately hurts both. The hostility expressed in the above article is destructive and stems from a narrow view which does not account for the existence of these two worlds.

--Brett Glass

Re:Symbiosis

[Brett Glass]

Your perceptions of Stallman, the GPL and history are warped. Symbolics and other companies didn't beging pulling out of academia because of anything Stallman did. They did it because they were greedy and thought they could get away with using the research without paying.

Not true. They paid MIT and give it free use of their software and equipment. However, by rights, the research should have been available to the world for free since it was largely government-funded.

The GPL does not deny corporations access to the software it covers,

Wrong. The GPL denies not only corporations but all developers access to the software for the purpose of building on it and making a reasonable living. The people most hurt by the GPL are not large corporations but smaller companies that might challenge them. I'm sure that Microsoft loves the GPL, because it is about to wipe out Be.

--Brett Glass

Re:Symbiosis

[JoeBuck]

It is scary that the person who wrote this nonsense makes part of his living as a journalist, as it is wrong in so many ways.

Stallman acted according to deeply held principles, not a "tantrum". You and I might not agree with those principles, but it discredits you to use such terms. He fought against Symbolics in much the same manner that FreeBSD is currently fighting against Sun: putting out non-copylefted free software. Symbolics could, and did, use RMS's work. If RMS's effort to compete against Symbolics was wrong, then you should, for consistency, attack the FreeBSD people for competing against Sun.

RMS did not "lose the use of his hands" in this effort; he's had some RSI problems, but your claim that he lost the use of his hands in the early 80s is ridiculous.

Symbolics was never in a position to provide a significant source of income to MIT, and in no alternative universe could they be.

RMS developed the GPL because he found that non-copylefted freeware was not effective in competing against Symbolics and others who could take the free base software and add a few proprietary enhancements.

It is true that academic research labs require support from the outside world. But that's no reason why research institutions shouldn't use licenses like the GPL; after all, the GPL is much more generous than the other popular model, which permits non-commercial or research use only and demands licensing for other use, even in cases where the taxpayers footed the bill for the original research (e.g. NCSA's handing of the original Mosaic).

Finally, you misuse the term "commercial developer". All companies and individuals who develop software for profit are commercial developers, no matter what licensing terms they choose to use for their software. Many commercial developers find the GPL superior to a BSD license for use in the code that they decide to release as freeware (whether it represents some or all of their output), as it avoids providing a subsidy to the competition.

People who put out GPLed software are competing in the free market. There are some whiners who don't like this competition; they hope that either their competitors will only sell their software for a high price, or they will license it under terms that allow relatively unskilled programmers to make small enhancements and sell those enhancements.

I get paid from writing proprietary software. I don't cry and wail because I can't grab other people's software and then sell it.

Re:Symbiosis

[JoeBuck]

Be was doomed from the start. What were they thinking? If Linux didn't exist, they'd be just as dead (or you'd be saying that *BSD is wiping them out, except that you seem to like those guys). There is zero chance for a new company to overcome Microsoft on the desktop with the traditional proprietary model, not without a technological change similar to the switch from mainframes to minis or minis to PCs.

Quite a few people (thousands) are making a reasonable living building on GPLed software. Some are now quite wealthy. But even if that weren't so, Sun, HP, and Microsoft are denying us all access to their software for the purpose of building on it and making a reasonable living (yes, one can write applications for those platforms and sell them, but one can do the same with Linux).

GPLed software can even be built on by proprietary companies; you can't link to the application, but you can use it. GCC is the back end for the leading commerical hardware description language simulators, for example, and the companies in question manage to charge $10K per seat and sometimes more.

Your problem is that you think that the BSD subsidy is a natural state of affairs. Sometimes it's a good solution. But it is a subsidy, one someone has to pay for.

It's not corporate vs. university.

[jetson123]

A lot of open source source code has come from corporate research labs and other parts of corporations. On the other hand, many universities, even those that traditionally were quite inclined towards open source, are strongly reinforcing their patent and intellectual property licensing efforts.

It is both universities and corporations that are holding on more tightly to intellectual property, in the belief that this is a way in which they can boost revenues. And the huge amounts of money that have been flowing into startups, plus the change in patent practices, are fueling the greed. (Sadly, the patent system is like the prisoner's dilemma: if every company stopped submitting software patents, most people would be better off, but if any particular company stops unilaterally, they'll lose big.)

The way to stem the tide is not to keep researchers out of companies, but to get open source friendly researchers into companies. Furthermore, the factors that have led to these kinds of changes need to be addressed; foremost, the patent system needs to be reformed, and the strongest arguments for reform can be made from a corporate environment.

Universities and government labs also need significant reform: increasingly, there seems to be an enmeshing of university business interests, commercial interests of professors, and students who get caught in the middle. Over the years, I have seen a tightening of regulations and enforcement, and if you are a student, you may well want to check your contract with the university: the open source project you are working on may well legally belong to them.

So, advocate open source and argue against software patents wherever you are. But don't shun working for corporations: if you do, all that you will accomplish is that the people with the money and connections are the ones that aren't interested in open source. As for startup money drawing people away from research careers, that's a big concern, but what can you do about it?

Enough with the famine routine!

[Watts Martin]

The number of people who died under Stalin's rule has absolutely no relevance to public funding of universities. If you want to argue for the superiority of private funding, go ahead, but don't pull out this red herring of equating anything that could be described as "socialized" with Stalinist oligarchy. You may not like Canada's socialized medical insurance system (it is not "socialized medicine," as doctors are still more often than not in private practice), but it has demonstrably not led to widespread famine and forced labor camps. And, in practice, only the purest of libertarians complains about the government structures that help business in the United states, from sugar subsidies to below-market logging in national forests, from local "incentives" to companies and sports teams to the S&L bailout.

I know it's heretical to suggest in this day and age that public institutions, sometimes even in the form of (gasp) Big Government, can actually do some things better than companies can, but sometimes that's hard to dispute--you can go back to the railroads, and a little more recently to the analog phone system. These were public-private partnerships because there is little economic justification for companies to pursue plans that will not pay off for a decade (or more).

If innovation is effectively privatized, there wouldn't be things like the World Wide Web. And Monsanto was a much more chilling example to have picked than I suspect you intended. Perhaps the idea of companies patenting crops that indigenous farmers have been planting for thousands of years and then charging the farmers to keep planting those crops doesn't bother you. Maybe the idea of your own genes being patented by a company--giving them control over not only research but applications (like disease treatments) involving the genes they "own"--doesn't bother you, either. It bothers me, though. It bothers me a lot.

Sorry Brett

[Chris Johnson]

The MIT AI Lab was _DARPA_ funded. The existence of the academic sandbox Stallman loved was due to government funding.

As soon as for-profit companies stepped in, the thriving community of hackers that existed in the MIT AI Lab was fragmented and eventually destroyed by the IP requirements of the for-profit companies, notably Symbolics which hired away most of the hackers and silenced them with NDAs.

Only after the MIT AI Lab was already destroyed did Stallman try to revenge himself on Symbolics. He did this through a burst of reverse engineering and singlehandedly kept pace with an entire team of the world's best hackers (at Symbolics), impressing the hell out of them. He succeeded in keeping up while reengineering everything Symbolics did, he didn't just 'try'. The products involved were LISP machines, which grew from concepts originally developed within the AI Lab, so it's not like Stallman had no experience with this- Symbolics had basically scorched the earth of _his_ turf, but everything they did was well within his experience and background. (EMACS is strongly LISP based)

The GPL prevents any such situation from recurring- it bars nobody from participating (despite many attempts to add 'except Microsoft can't use my code!' clauses) and the single condition it imposes is that the code licensed under the GPL remains forever open for discussion and exchange. It does nothing else, and can only be considered a weapon if you expect commercial developers to be allowed to take OTHER PEOPLE'S work away from them, which seems an unusual position.

There is no symbiosis between academia and the commercial world. The best that can be expected is armed truce- masters of this art, such as Nicholas Negroponte and his Media Lab, make it look easy, but practice a level of diplomacy as dangerous and tricky as full-on political diplomacy. Negroponte once explained his technique like this: when a company funded research it was made available to all. No companies like this, so Negroponte would say, "Okay, we'll do it your way. And when you come to see your research, we'll blindfold you and lead you right to it. There's 20 billion dollars of other research going on here that you could be seeing, but you won't see any of it. And then when you're done we'll blindfold you again and take you right back out. It's your choice."

That is 'symbiosis'? To me it sounds like power politics and the cunning balancing of totally incompatible interests. Calling it symbiosis is woefully understating the brilliance of the negotiating skills and determination of people like Negroponte, who truly understand the game they are playing- which is more than I can say for you.

Congratulations, Brett. I've never read a post so breathtakingly wrong! :)

Re:$120K a year isn't an incentive?

[vlax]

...as a well-known professor.

Most aren't. Which typical midwestern university pays over $100K for most of its profs?

A google search turns up:

Southwest Missouri State University at http://www.smsu.edu/OIR/factbook/faculty_and_staff .htm :

The average salary of all nine-month instructional staff for 1999-2000 was $48,889.

University of Nevada: http://www.unlv.edu/ssasc/st4dft.html

University: UNLV UNR
Professor: $78,700 $81,900
Associate Professor: $59,500 $60,500
Assistant Professor: $46,800 $49,000

About 1/3 of profs there are fully tenured - all others are associates or assistant profs.

Kansas State: http://collegian.ksu.edu/issues/v102/sp/n109/news/ cam.braindrain.lucke.html

The average salary of a tenured professor is about $48,000 (...) According to the Office of Institutional Research at Iowa State University, the average salary of a full professor at ISU for the 1996-97 academic year was about $73,000. (...) Salaries at the University of Colorado-Boulder are also greater than those at K-State. UCB Office of Budget and Planning reported an average professor salary of $71,627 for the 1995-96 year.

Remember once again, few people get full tenure.

Northern Kentucky University:
http://www.nku.edu/~nku01/ngl9596e.html#avgsal

Average salary including the law school in 1995-6: $42,416/yr.

In fact, go to http://www.econ.umn.edu/~cswan/AAUP/Spring96.html and check out the 1996 pay scale for top research universities. A full prof at Stanford, Yale, Harvard and CalTech made just over $100,000 per year. At Stanford and CalTech, that's a comfortable middle class living. (Move out here if you don't believe me.) Adjuncts and Associates don't even get close to that.

Business model unproven for software

[Brett Glass]

While companies such as IBM and DEC have shown that servicing "big iron" is an extremely profitable business, the same case has never been made for software -- especially microcomputer software. Why? First, there is abundant free help available -- especially on the Internet. (Advocates of GPLed software are also pushing for the creation of free documentation, which will eliminate much support revenue. This movement, spearheaded by Richard Stallman, is intended to cut companies such as Red Hat -- which hope to make money via support -- off at the knees. Stallman considers these companies to be parasites, and tolerates them on a temporary basis because they further the spread of the GPL and the damage it does.)

Second, support is expensive. Minimum wage laws, overhead, mandatory benefits, training costs, and high turnover make it difficult to do technical support at a price consumers are willing to pay.

Third, remote support is difficult and time-consuming. As anyone who has done tech support knows, most computer users do not know the names of the items they see on their screens -- or even that they have names. Absent a remote control system (which may not work if the machine is disabled), even an expert technical support staffer can take hours to diagnose a simple problem on the phone with a customer.

Red Hat, the "poster child" for distributors of GPLed software, has lost millions of dollars per employee over its lifetime.

This is why Red Hat wrote, in its most recent Form 10-Q:

OUR BUSINESS MAY NOT SUCCEED BECAUSE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE BUSINESS MODELS ARE UNPROVEN

We have not demonstrated the success of our open source business model, which gives our customers the right freely to copy and distribute our software. No other company has built a successful open source business. Few open source software products have gained widespread commercial acceptance partly due to the lack of viable open source industry participants to offer adequate service and support on a long term basis. In addition, open source vendors are not able to provide industry standard warranties and indemnities for their products, since these products have been developed largely by independent parties over whom open source vendors exercise no control or supervision. If open source software should fail to gain widespread commercial acceptance, we would not be able to sustain our revenue growth and our business could fail.

This is not surprising. What's more, due to the GPL, Red Hat does not even own its own products free and clear! In fact, it has virtually no assets. No assets? No profits? This doesn't paint a very promising picture.

And what about the future? Again, let's hear the story straight from the horse's mouth. Red Hat says that it's not sure it will ever make money:

WE EXPECT TO INCUR SUBSTANTIAL LOSSES FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE

We have incurred operating losses in four of our previous five fiscal years, including our most recent fiscal year ended February 28, 1999, as well as in the nine months ended November 30, 1999. We expect to incur significant losses for the foreseeable future, as we substantially increase our sales and marketing, research and development and administrative expenses. In addition, we are investing considerable resources in our web initiatives and to expand our professional services offerings. As a result, we cannot be certain when or if we will achieve sustained profitability. Failure to become and remain profitable may adversely affect the market price of our common stock and our ability to raise capital and continue operations. See "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations--Overview", "--Results of Operations" and "--Liquidity and Capital Resources".

None of this should be surprising. The purpose of the GPL is not to enable software businesses but to destroy them. This was its explicit intent, and this is what it's doing. If you hope to make any money, better make it by buying and selling stock and taking advantage of gullible investors. You won't make it on GPLed software.

--Brett Glass

My "well-considered" post

[vlax]

I did make a dig at Gould and Hawkings, but I'm of the same opinion as you: it doesn't bother me that they take the cash since they can. If a physicist gets famous, good for him. My point is that they didn't get to be rich or famous by doing commercially viable private research, they did publicly funded research which they published openly. Their fame derives from the same prestige system which I claim is being undermined by the drop in public funds for research.

In the long run, science can't prosper without review by other scientists. It's far too easy for one research team to believe they are on the track of something that doesn't really exist. In the end, the process of peer review and disemmination is what prevents calamities like Lysenkoism.

The Manhattan project used physics that was already well-known. It sought techniques for the specific application of that physics. Uranium was first split in a public lab, and the physics of mass-energy conversion were as well-known to German physicists as to American ones. And lastly, the Manhattan project did not continue to produce new science for very long. It ended with the war and most of its participants went back to their labs to do science the old-fashioned way.

No classified lab has ever started a revolution in science, and only occaisionally in engineering, but frankly, I disagree with the high level of secrecy of DOE and DOD research. So does much of the DOE and DOD - ARPA projects are rarely secret, and the Defense department funds a great deal of public research because they know that there is more to gain in open science than there is to loose.

Closed science is the enemy, not corporations, or even corporate research. It is the culture of secrecy that springs up when science ceases to be about prestige and becomes a pursuit of short-term profit.

Re:My "well-considered" post

[vlax]

I haven't thought too much about your idea for patents, but I am willing to. I want to see research remain open to all and if new IP laws will help make that happen, I have no problem with it.

I don't want to forbid commercial research, and I do realise that patents are part of the incentive system to turn new science into technologies that improve people's lives. I agree with the need for patent reform, although I have not yet seen an agenda for reform that I find convincing. But I still persist in believing that real science must be public in order to work, and the maintenance of publicly funded research is the only way I know of to do that. Considering the public benefits of science and the technology that derives from it, I consider my taxes spent to that end money well spent.

Yes, Hawking and Gould derive their fame and fortunes in large part to publishing well-written, well-read books, and being telegenic certainly doesn't hurt. However, had they been merely good writers and not high-prestige theorists in their respective fields, they would never have been able to command the audiences and some of money that their books command. No one has ever invited John Gribbin to do a walk-in on the USS Enterprise, and he is twice the writer Hawking is.

In short, the kind of fame and fortune enjoyed by the likes of Gould and Hawking is a perk of doing public research that leads to high prestige. No one whose most important work has been in closed corporate or military research has ever attained such fame. The knowledge that a handful of scientists can do what Hawking and Gould have done is an important motivating factor for young scientists. I know it was for me in my youth, and I still have dreams of attaining fame and fortune for my theories and getting TV appearances and book contracts (although I'm a bit more realistic about the odds that it will happen.) It beats the hell out of honest work.

Actually, I'm on the opposite side from Gould on most things, and I think it is only due to prejudices among scientists and Gould's excellent command of the English language that anyone pays attention to what he says at all.

I was trained in Hawking's line of work, but ended up in territory much closer to Gould's, so trust me, I understand about undeserved authority. I still belief in public science, because without it, widely accepted authorities like Gould will never be overcome.

Deep down, I'm a Popperite. I know, for a borderline Marxist that's a bit strange. (Actually, it's incredibly strange, but that's another posting.) Popper's description of how science functions is the only one I've ever found even vaguely convincing. For Popper, science was about making conjectures, little more than inductive guesses really, then exposing them to the community of scientists. There, the conjecture is subject to the most destructive criticism its proponents and opponents alike can think of. If it survives, it's eventually accepted (usually when those who oppose it die off.)

In principle, even the most venerated theory is always subject to the same scepticism and test by falsification as the latest thing out of CERN. It doesn't always work that way - you are absolutely right on that - but that is a problem of the sociology of science. Eventually, if a theory is wrong, the amount of evidence against it will make it impossible to hold. In science all false doctrines eventually die. This is a product of subjecting every hypothesis, no matter how well established, to public criticism. I don't see how closed commercial labs or any other environment of secrecy can do this.

Science is not an optimally efficient process. It is full of constant conflicts between theorists and schools of thought, not to mention the inevitable battle of the young and radical against the old and established. Peer review can be a tortuous matter when you are flying in the face of received knowledge. (Thomas Gold just wrote a book on the subject if you're interested.) Science is a battlefield of ideas. It's practitioners are egotistical, prejudiced and motivated by the same desire for prestige, fame and fortune as other men. So long as the route to those things is only available through publication and public criticism, this awkward system works.

Classical physics took a half century to die, long after the classical view became untenable. Indeed, there are still people who oppose relativity (look at James Hogan's website for an example) and quantum mechanics (too many of those to list.) This is not economically efficient, I don't doubt that, the only justification of the traditional culture of open science is that it works. It may work in fits and spurts, but it works. And I don't want it to stop working.

Bzzzt. Wrong on MANY points.

[Brett Glass]

The MIT AI Lab was _DARPA_ funded. The existence of the academic sandbox Stallman loved was due to government funding.

Only partially. There was private funding as well. And that private funding increased when LMI and Symbolics were formed.

Government funding of research that can be commercially exploited is a good thing as well. The public has benefited greatly from spinoffs of NASA technology, for example.

The far worse situation occurs when companies do not form to bring the fruits of research to the rest of the world. Who is going to build the machines that the academics have been funded to conceive of? Not the schools, but private enterprise. It's an important part of the picture.

As soon as for-profit companies stepped in, the thriving community of hackers that existed in the MIT AI Lab was fragmented and eventually destroyed by the IP requirements of the for-profit companies, notably Symbolics which hired away most of the hackers and silenced them with NDAs.

And would you have had the hackers permanently indentured at the AI Lab? Stallman would have. In fact, the stated intent of the GPL was to destroy jobs that paid better than the slave wages earned by grad students in the MIT AI Lab.

When it came time for commercial development of the ideas which had been developed there, it was only natural that many of them would want to take part in that. Academics frequently hold jobs both in academia and in private companies, and/or go back and forth between the two. However, by attempting to sabotage the commercial endeavors, Stallman alienated the companies that might otherwise have supported continued research at the Lab. No wonder they weren't cooperative! Stallman was using MIT's money and facilities in an attempt to destroy their businesses.

Only after the MIT AI Lab was already destroyed did Stallman try to revenge himself on Symbolics.

According to the account he told to Steven Levy, who was researching the book "Hackers," he started exacting "revenge" on people who disagreed with him far earlier than that. Levy relates that Stallman refused to provide EMACS software -- which he was being paid by MIT to write! -- to users on the Computer Science department's systems. Why? Because they used passwords to keep their machines from being broken into from across the ARPANet. Yes, that's right; Stallman was so radically opposed to the notion of computer security that he committed "violence" (his own word!) against people who wanted to secure their systems against attacks from the outside.

He did this through a burst of reverse engineering and singlehandedly kept pace with an entire team of the world's best hackers (at Symbolics), impressing the hell out of them. He succeeded in keeping up while reengineering everything Symbolics did, he didn't just 'try'.

It's not clear that he actually succeeded, since of course it was not in the interest of the Symbolics employees to correct his mistakes or omissions.

What success Stallman did enjoy was likely due to the fact that reverse engineering is much easier than engineering a feature from scratch. Copying is always an order of magnitude easier than producing the original work. Being a crazed, totally obsessed individual with no life, it's no wonder that Stallman could reimplement much of that they'd done.

The GPL prevents any such situation from recurring-

Not so. It is very easy to do clean room reverse engineering on GPLed code. What the GPL does do, however, is sabotage young companies and programmers with promising ideas.

it bars nobody from participating

Not true. It prohibits commercial developers from making use of open source without giving away the farm.

(despite many attempts to add 'except Microsoft can't use my code!' clauses) and the single condition it imposes is that the code licensed under the GPL remains forever open for discussion and exchange. It does nothing else,

Bull. It ensures that programmers cannot make a living by licensing their work. Stallman says explicitly, in The GNU Manifesto, that this is what the GPL does and is designed to do.

and can only be considered a weapon if you expect commercial developers to be allowed to take OTHER PEOPLE'S work away from them,

Not so. It is a weapon because it undermines commercial developers' work. Anyone can use GPLed code in the way which most benefits him or her -- except commercial developers. Even though the author of GPLed code has forfeited any prospect of ever making a single penny from the code, and has in effect given the code away to everyone else in the world except those developers. This isn't ethical; it's a game of "keep-away."

There is no symbiosis between academia and the commercial world.

It's a good thing that universities and companies disagree with this stance. If they embraced it, a lot would be lost on both sides. Just as a treasure is lost whenever another a line of code falls under the vicious, viral, unethical GPL.

--Brett

My, my!

[Chris Johnson]

Such an onslaught of revisionism! I love how people say the GPL 'infects any code that comes near it', for values of 'come near it' that equal 'take GPLed code, read it, copy big chunks of it and use it as the basis of your own thing'. Clearly the only ethical choice is to allow people to take everything you do and _not_ ask anything of them in return! furrfu.

"In fact, the stated intent of the GPL was to destroy jobs that paid better than the slave wages earned by grad students in the MIT AI Lab."

How quaint! And to think that I believed the GPL was for taking coding ideas and forcibly preventing them from being filched and made proprietary by people like you. Shocked, I am, to learn that 'Saint Ignatius's only real interest is in destroying jobs! Could you have misheard him? Maybe he wants to destroy Wozniak instead ;)

"Levy relates that Stallman refused to provide EMACS software -- which he was being paid by MIT to write! -- to users on the Computer Science department's systems. Why? Because they used passwords to keep their machines from being broken into from across the ARPANet."

It may have escaped your attention, but at the time, the AI lab did not USE passwords. At the time, people were evolving ways of functioning in 'electronic society' without locks and passwords and barriers, and it actually worked, because people felt the obligation to behave civilly, given the freedom to do harm. The use of passwords you cite was not business as usual, but the imposition of a new set of regulations which assumed anyone with the freedom to do harm would obviously do it, and arranged matters so nobody had that freedom. I realise that you think this is the only way the world can work. We'll never know now, will we? Because RMS failed in his attempt to force the issue, and did not convince the world that establishing social expectations was the way to handle 'security'. (Also, it's interesting to note how you fulminate against anyone interfering with a business-employed coder's right to withhold their code from others if they wish, but won't accept RMS's academia-funded right to withhold EMACS from others as he wished. So if you are a business, you get to do whatever you want, but if you are academic or an OSS type you are obliged to be exploited and trod upon?)

"What the GPL does do, however, is sabotage young companies and programmers with promising ideas."

The _order_ you put that in is interesting, but the claim makes no sense whatsoever. Surely a young company with programmers and promising ideas is free to do whatever it wants, within reason? Do you think a good idea cannot compete against a GPLed implementation of 'cheap imitation' quality? Do you have that little faith in the marketplace that the mere existence of free things terrifies you so? Do you think little elves will sneak into the fine young company under cover of darkness and, cackling malignantly, GPL everything while nobody is looking? You've got some very strange ideas about what the GPL _means_ to a company that wants no part of it. Such as:

"It prohibits commercial developers from making use of open source without giving away the farm."

Why in God's name do you think commercial developers _should_ get to make use of open source? Being a commercial developer usually means proprietary code. Use that. If you must compete and not interact cooperatively with others, come up with your own damn ideas. For _years_ there wasn't a major, public open source movement, and no commercial developers complained about this at all. Nobody objected in the slightest to having to reinvent the wheel behind closed doors, it was a way of life to come up with your own code. Now all of a sudden, OSS is trendy, and suddenly access to other people's code is a _right_?

"Bull. It (the GPL) ensures that programmers cannot make a living by licensing their work."

Nice spin! *clap clap* But of course the key words here are 'BY LICENSING THEIR WORK', and it's most amusing to note how you avoid mentioning this effect only happens to programmers who license under the GPL themselves! You have a real talent for bullshit propaganda, do you work for Mindcraft? The implication of your statement is clearly 'that all programmers are deprived of making a living by the GPL'. The reality, of course, is that programmers can and do make a living by the service they provide (not by any concept of their resulting work as private property)- and that it is ALWAYS up to you the programmer to choose to GPL something or not, and if you don't, all the options of intellectual property licensing remain open to you. In fact they'd be open to you if you GPL, they are just toothless because anyone has the right to have the source of anything you've GPLed. For the programmers who don't GPL, it's even sillier to claim the GPL scorches their earth and ruins their lives and stock options. It has no effect on them at all. Or are all commercial programmers so pathetic that OSS programmers working for free can out-code, out-compete, out-market and out-distribute them? If so, what is your justification for coddling the commercial programmers? Let 'em die! But I am the owner of numerous commercial programs- for instance, I use Photoshop over the GIMP, because Photoshop is _way_ better in my opinion. I think you are being unduly alarmist, behaving like the GPL will kill programmers like the ones who did Photoshop. To compete you have to _compete_, not just own an idea and sit on your ass 'protecting' it...

"It is a weapon because it undermines commercial developers' work. Anyone can use GPLed code in the way which most benefits him or her -- except commercial developers."

Cry me a river. Commercial developers are paid to develop. They have resources which part-time people couldn't begin to dream of. They have extra clout with other commercial developers- when Microsoft talks, Apple listens. When Id talks, Microsoft listens. Interestingly, when the GPL talks, Id listens ;) it would appear that John Carmack can use GPLed code in the way which most benefits him: releasing disused engines so people can play with them and develop things from them, but in such a way that the engine itself cannot be taken and turned into a competing commercial engine to go up against Q3Arena. Bungie has also done this with the Marathon 2 source, recently, also using the GPL. The GPL is _ideal_ for protecting the interests of commercial developers who want to give away their old engines for people to enjoy, but don't want to be bothered supporting them and DON'T want to be seeding another commercial competitor. It's shocking you don't see this considering how common the situation is now.

"This isn't ethical; it's a game of "keep-away.""

This is different from proprietary code exactly how?

"Just as a treasure is lost whenever another a line of code falls under the vicious, viral, unethical GPL."

My. Words fail me. Aside from the fact that this is nonsense, why do you feel that you have any business saying this on Slashdot? I'll give you credit for not preaching to the choir here, but on the other hand you've got to be fscking crazy if you think this argument carries weight here. You're ranting and ignoring the logic of the situation and trying to scare people away from using the GPL, and again I say, why? What on earth about it could be so threatening to you? Are you really that incompetent that you can't compete on grounds of quality, marketing, distribution or trendiness with mere open source software? OSS is like a flood on the rise. It will work its way into all valleys, it will wash away lowlands. If you suck, OSS will bury you: if you make terrific code, it won't be able to touch you unless you want to use it for _your_ purposes like Carmack does. There is no "Can't I just suck in peace without having to compete? I own intellectual property!" option.

OSS is a flood. If you don't want to be part of it, then rise above it. If you won't bother to rise above it, then shut up and drown!

"My, My!" indeed.

[Brett Glass]

Such an onslaught of revisionism!

Ad hominem attacks weaken your argument.

I love how people say the GPL 'infects any code that comes near it',

I did not make that assertion. It is, however, true that GPLed code infects any work in which it is included or to which it is linked. This is true regardless of the quantity of GPLed code that is used. This represents an "unconscionable" provision which I believe renders the GPL unenforceable.

for values of 'come near it' that equal 'take GPLed code, read it, copy big chunks of it and use it as the basis of your own thing'.

A loaded and prejudicial interpretation which doesn't square with the arguments that others are making. See above.

Clearly the only ethical choice is to allow people to take everything you do and _not_ ask anything of them in return! furrfu.

In fact, this is the best way to publish open source because it does the maximum amount of good. Since one is forfeiting any opportunity to make money from the code when one publishes it as open source, it is unethical to arbitrarily deny to anyone else the chance to benefit from it. Especially when the intent is to do harm.

How quaint! And to think that I believed the GPL was for taking coding ideas and forcibly preventing them from being filched and made proprietary by people like you. Shocked, I am, to learn that 'Saint Ignatius's only real interest is in destroying jobs! Could you have misheard him? Maybe he wants to destroy Wozniak instead ;)

Apparently, you're not aware of the GPL's history or motivations. The stated purpose of the GPL is to destroy opportunities for programmers to make salaries better than they could make in academia. In The GNU Manifesto, Richard Stallman writes:

For more than ten years, many of the world's best programmers worked at the Artificial Intelligence Lab for far less money than they could have had anywhere else. They got many kinds of non-monetary rewards: fame and appreciation, for example. And creativity is also fun, a reward in itself.

Then most of them left when offered a chance to do the same interesting work for a lot of money.

What the facts show is that people will program for reasons other than riches; but if given a chance to make a lot of money as well, they will come to expect and demand it. Low-paying organizations do poorly in competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned.

It may have escaped your attention, but at the time, the AI lab did not USE passwords.

I know. I visited at the time. However, MIT was putting more and more machines on the ARPANet, and passwords were becoming essential. To deny the need for them was, and is, sheer folly.

At the time, people were evolving ways of functioning in 'electronic society' without locks and passwords and barriers, and it actually worked, because people felt the obligation to behave civilly, given the freedom to do harm.

Unfortunately, as recent developments have shown, that perspective was naive. Allowing strangers even limited access to computers on the network paves the way for denial of service attacks -- such as the ones we've seen in recent weeks -- and worse. And now that important and sensitive communications are routinely sent by e-mail, I doubt that you'd be willing to allow all and sundry to have access to your mailbox.

The use of passwords you cite was not business as usual, but the imposition of a new set of regulations which assumed anyone with the freedom to do harm would obviously do it, and arranged matters so nobody had that freedom.

I see. By analogy, I suppose we should insist that no one should have a lock on his or her door either. Do you lock the door to your house? Do you take the keys out of your car when you park it? Do you lock your bicycle if you ride one? If you truly believe what you say above, you would be hypocritical if you did.

I realise that you think this is the only way the world can work. We'll never know now, will we?

I believe that last week's attacks, plus the recent rash of Web site defacements and credit card number thefts, have settled that question once and for all -- if it was ever a serious question to begin with.

Because RMS failed in his attempt to force the issue,

As he should have. By attempting to force the issue, he was guilty of gross insubordination. Had I been his supervisor, I would have fired him on the spot for endangering MIT's resources and the personal information of its staff, faculty, and students. He was, and is, a dangerous loony.

and did not convince the world that establishing social expectations was the way to handle 'security'.

Of course he didn't; it's a fool's errand. The notion is as absurd as expecting "social expectations" to prevent burglary and other crimes.

(Also, it's interesting to note how you fulminate against anyone interfering with a business-employed coder's right to withhold their code from others if they wish,

Again, an ad hominem attack. The fact is that if a coder is employed by a business, what he creates on the job is the property of that business. And, yes, the business has the right to release that code to the world or not. It's not the programmer's individual decision. By becoming an employee and doing the work on the job in return for a salary, the programmer has agreed willingly to this.

but won't accept RMS's academia-funded right to withhold EMACS from others as he wished. So if you are a business, you get to do whatever you want, but if you are academic or an OSS type you are obliged to be exploited and trod upon?)

RMS was an employee of MIT, and as such the code he created on the school's time and with its equipment was its property. When he agreed to be employed by the University, he agreed willingly to this. He did not have the right to withhold the code from his employer or from parts of the University whose policies he did not like.

The _order_ you put that in is interesting, but the claim makes no sense whatsoever. Surely a young company with programmers and promising ideas is free to do whatever it wants, within reason? Do you think a good idea cannot compete against a GPLed implementation of 'cheap imitation' quality?

Even if the free product is far inferior, it is difficult and sometimes impossible. Microsoft has demonstrated this with EMM386, DoubleSpace, and Internet Explorer.

Do you have that little faith in the marketplace that the mere existence of free things terrifies you so?

Again, an ad hominem attack. The truth has nothing to do with "faith" or with being "terrified." Nor is the existence of things which are available at no cost necessarily destructive. However, the GPL is intended to make it destructive.

Do you think little elves will sneak into the fine young company under cover of darkness and, cackling malignantly, GPL everything while nobody is looking?

Elves are not required. Those who follow the industry may recall that Be, Inc. had problems with GPL infection of its OS kernel not long ago. Richard Stallman in fact advocates the introduction of GPLed code into companies' programs as a way of coercing them to forfeit their intellectual property. (See his essay, Why Software Should Not Have Owners.)

You've got some very strange ideas about what the GPL _means_ to a company that wants no part of it.

Not so. Every assertion I've made is provable via empirical evidence. Even if a software company wants no part of the GPL, it is injured by the destruction of its markets.

Why in God's name do you think commercial developers _should_ get to make use of open source?

Because denying to them -- and them alone -- the use of open source code is an explicit attempt to hurt them. That's why the BSD license is ethical and the GPL is not.

Being a commercial developer usually means proprietary code. Use that.

This argument ignores the obvious: the GPL damages programmers and their livelihoods whether or not they use GPLed code themselves.

If you must compete and not interact cooperatively with others, come up with your own damn ideas.

You appear not to understand intellectual property law. Ideas are protected by patent, not copyright.

For _years_ there wasn't a major, public open source movement, and no commercial developers complained about this at all.

Not true. It was well known that open source code such as BIND, Sendmail, and the BSD TCP/IP stack were available for free to everyone -- including developers. It is the release of GPLed code -- which, actually, is not open source because the GPL discriminates against a field of endeavor -- which hurts developers.

Nobody objected in the slightest to having to reinvent the wheel behind closed doors, it was a way of life to come up with your own code.

Not true. Code reuse has always been an important concept.

Now all of a sudden, OSS is trendy, and suddenly access to other people's code is a _right_?

Stallman, and many of his more fanatic followers, would assert that anyone should have the right to access anyone's code. However, when programs are published as freely redistributable open source, it is unethical to deny the use of the code to developers.

[Several ad hominem attacks deleted here]

Commercial developers are paid to develop. They have resources which part-time people couldn't begin to dream of.

Not true. Many are individual programmers who hope to make a reasonable living -- despite efforts by large corporations such as Microsoft or the FSF to put them out of business via predatory practices. (And, yes, the FSF is a large corporation. It holds the exclusive rights to large amounts of extremely valuable intellectual property and engages in predatory practices routinely; in fact, that's its purpose.)

"This isn't ethical; it's a game of "keep-away.""

This is different from proprietary code exactly how?

You are being disingenuous here. In a game of "keep away," everyone can have access to an object except one person who needs and desires it. The object of the game is to gang up on, and hurt, that person.

Having private property is, of course, very different from engaging in that destructive and cruel game.

My. Words fail me. Aside from the fact that this is nonsense, why do you feel that you have any business saying this on Slashdot?

Perhaps it's because I believe that this view should be heard. Or that Slashdot isn't, and shouldn't be, a place where only views that conform to the FSF's "party line" may be expressed.

I'll give you credit for not preaching to the choir here, but on the other hand you've got to be fscking crazy if you think this argument carries weight here.

Again, an ad hominem attack. The analogy to religion is, however, apt.

OSS is a flood. If you don't want to be part of it, then rise above it. If you won't bother to rise above it, then shut up and drown!

In the above, you attempt to characterize me as being opposed to open source, which is not the case. I am opposed to the GPL, which attempts to turn open source into a weapon against commercial software developers and programmers in general. By voicing this opposition, I am indeed attempting to "rise above the flood" and prevent open source from being turned from a useful tool into a weapon of spite. Only those who are malicious would oppose this.

--Brett Glass

Re:"My, My!" indeed.

[Chris Johnson]

Well, sir:

I have no sympathy or patience towards your opposition to the GPL. You will clearly spend hours trying to get it stamped out, write reams of argument trying to scare people away from using it, and all to support commercial companies. Now, I am not intrinsically opposed to commercial companies- as I said (which you ignored) I make heavy use of some commercial software like Photoshop, like the programming environment REALbasic. However, I'm increasingly of the opinion that the more rope I give commercial software, the more likely they are to hang _me_ with it, and you too.

You seem blithely unaware of UCITA, of a whole steady movement toward legislating and sanctifying the worst abuses of commercial software. These go beyond a company buying up brainpower and starving entire fields of endeavor from the ideas they need to progress- all the way toward having and using the right to sabotage my own computer in any way they like if they form the idea that I've violated their licensing in some way, and being fully supported by the law in this.

Naturally, the amoral capitalism you espouse will reward those who seize this opportunity quickest, and we can confidently expect the proliferation of this sort of abuse. In some ways your viewpoint is like this: for the users, the world is a battleground, an urban wasteland. But if you're a company, the world is supposedly like the small Vermont town I lived in 6 years or so ago, in which nobody really bothered to lock their cars and everybody knew everybody- stultifying but safe. The unspoken idea is that one _must_ support business and commercial software at all costs, because they are the seat of decency in the world, with a commercial morality that (unlike regular morality) can be reduced to dollars and cents: and that this results in Good Being Done and the accumulation of Profit.

I look out at the constant background of aggressive maneuvers done by closed-source software companies- not simply against each other, against _us_ the consumers- and can't understand why anyone would have more faith in them than in a pack of rabid rats- or why this state of affairs deserves protecting. Just because it results in salaries being paid is not a good enough reason to support it. Look at what happens as a result. You get Photoshop- but you also get Windows Me. You get Id- but you also get Blizzard. You get start-ups- but you also get UCITA. You get Microsoft, and you'll never get rid of them as long as you live. Is this worth protecting? What about the vocation of software coding is so special that guaranteeing its artificially high income is worth setting up this kind of mess?

RMS may well be a loony, but I'd say he was a loony for being twenty years too early. Look at his fanatical opposition to closed-source in the light of UCITA (which did not exist at the time he was forming his ideas). Perhaps it was only chance, or perhaps the reason his fanaticism becomes relevant now is that he really saw and acted on the _result_ of what he saw happening. It's dangerous to 'project' outcomes like that, you can end up totally wrong. RMS could have read the whole situation wrong, back then, and if he had, GNU would have languished basically unused and commercial software would have turned out to be a greatly liberating force with no drawbacks to it, requiring no alternative because all freedom and choice and security was available within it.

Welcome to the real world. It seems that there _was_ a need for GNU- look at all the GNU, the Linux, the GPL out there. It's never been _easy_ to use this stuff, it's geek-only so far, yet people are still forced to turn to it: look at the litany of security bugs, acts of sabotage and intentional incompatibility, the lossage of the commercial software industry. Look at the legislation being passed successfully to reduce their liability even more, scorning all concepts of consumer protection- look at the ideas, the total disregard for private property that leads a commercial software company to think they have a right to seize MY COMPUTER without due process if they think I might have done something wrong, that they have a right to grovel all over it assuming I am guilty of piracy or something until _they_ satisfy themselves that I am innocent- but if _I_ grovel all over their work with a decompiler, I can go to _jail_! Not cyber-jail, real concrete and steel jail for up to five years!

Brett, I did not ask them to behave in this manner. I would have been _quite_ happy to support software companies as you would insist I do, respecting their rights to earn a living. Their rights end, however, when they start arranging to have me thrown in jail, and begin crawling up my computer like IRS auditors looking for violations. I never agreed to their coming on my 'private property' (my computer and data _is_ my property. It's _my_ data) and behaving in such a manner.

It's possible that I'm letting a few bad apples spoil the barrel. However, that's what _happens_: the others end up mimicking the ones making the most money, and crime has always paid. In this case, the precedent is set, the legislation is already being passed, the die is cast.

If they're going to redefine the industry in this manner, I will wholeheartedly embrace the ideas that were (opinionatedly) put forth by RMS so many years ago, in a simpler time that probably didn't rate that sort of hysteria. Times have changed, and it appears that OSS people did not have to declare a war at all- war has been declared on us, by just these commercial software people, up to and including the intention to change the very open standards of the Net itself out from under us to destroy even our communications with each other.

If taking sides makes me malicious, I can only say that I feel justified in such malice, and that I didn't set out to be- my trust was broken. I side against you. I oppose you utterly- not because you are being intentionally malicious, but because you're a damned fool supporting something worse than you imagine. I side with the OSS people, RMS, and the GPL.

How do I take sides with the GPL? It's not by passing laws to outlaw commercial software, by breaking the kneecaps of commercial developers or burning down their office buildings, it's not by planning to develop special GPL-only net standards or writing software that scans your hard drive to see if you're using GPL code in some commercial project- in other words, it's not by malicious means or even the means of commercial software.

I USE IT! So far, I am still free to do so.

_Shame_ on you, Brett. You are a liar and a propagandist supporting a corrupt and abusive system. How do you sleep? I realise this gives you the ability to pull another debator move and cry 'ad hominem' yet again, but I am honestly wondering how you can justify your position to yourself. Is it that, to you, none of the on-record hostile acts of commercial software companies count? Is it that computers are not private property but actually belong to the vendors that make the hardware and software, and that we rent them/borrow them? Is it that you feel capitalism is so religiously important that it must be supported over consumer or even human rights? Is it that you cannot see human existence except in terms of how much a person earns, with no other values? What is it? State your faith if you insist on keeping on arguing like this. You are trying to harm something important, and I want to know why.

spirited rhetoric

[JamesKPolk]

Fund academia. It is that simple.

Whom are you asking to fund academia? Ah, silly question. It's clear what you want. You want governments to take people's money, and redistribute it.

If current trends continue, we'll see increasing brain drains, such as Microsoft's infamous raid on Carnegie Mellon's OS faculty (for those of you who haven't heard, they came, offered huge salaries, and basically left the CMU CS dept without any OS specialists), which will transfer brain power in the hands of those who cannot use it ethically simply because their primary goal is profit.

How will transferring the money from corporations, to government, fix this? You prefer that the nuclear physicists work at Los Alamos, the mathematicians work at the NSA, and the biologists work in the Army's super-ultra-very-very secret biological weapons labs?

Unless all the money goes to such government agencies, the financial competition as you describe will continue. If some Caltech chemical group lands a huge grant, it will be able to better attract the best minds. If some Stanford AI group receives government cash, it will be able to buy students and faculty from other schools.

The only reason such things don't happen now, is that the universities don't have enough money to do it. The motive of fame and glory is just as strong in academia, as the motive of stock prices is in coroporations. Increasing people's tax burden, and injecting government money into the fray, won't fix what you claim is wrong.

Unfortunately, academia requires a huge investment to maintain, since it does not naturally flourish under market forces; it is that investment that is needed to keep "intellectual property" out of the hands of those who want to "own" it. And it is that investment that needs to be made continually for research as we know it to survive.

Ah, now we see the real point: the typical slashdot "intellectual property is bad" POV. All it would take to fix the intellectual property legal tangle, would be to fix the patent office, and tweak the current federal law. There's no need for massive tax-and-spend, socialist politics for that to happen. Corporations won't suddenly stop R&D if patent laws change, because it'll still be necessary to survive. After all, there do exist trade secrets, and industrial espionage.

Oh, yes. One more thing. Do you have any evidence, that academic research "does not naturally flourish under market forces"? Note that you're complaining that pwople were recruited from Carnegie-Mellon University. And note earlier my mention of Stanford. Philanthropy is a natural thing. People try to make billions, not for the money, but for the fame and power. Giving money to Universities is a fine way for these people to prove to themselves that they have both. Always has been, always will.

Re:Don't use the GPL, then.

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

The GPL does not allow you to link a GPLed piece of code against a non-GPLed piece of code, even if it's dynamically-linked. You're likely thinking of the LGPL (library/lesser GPL), which does allow you to split up a project in such a way.

As long as all of your libraries are LGPLed (and most of them out there are), you're fine, and you only have to distribute modifications to the libraries you're using.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Stehpen Hawking

[The Iconoclast]

only people in science who do get rich are high-prestige scientists who get book contracts, do the lecture circuit, and for the really lucky, get bit parts in TV shows like the Simpsons and Star Trek.

Actually, Stephen Hawking isn't all that wealtly. I watched the Larry King Interview with him on CNN on 12/25 (best hour I EVER spent watching the tube). It is actually exceedingly lucky for him, and us of course, that he is still able to write books and such, as most of that has allowed him to afford the medical care that he needs.

However, you do get a bit of money for doing the lecture circuit, TV shows, and books. This money will allow you to live comfortably, but it really won't make you rich, per se.

A wealthy eccentric who marches to the beat of a different drum. But you may call me "Noodle Noggin."