Researchers' Right To Open Source Research

bstadil writes: "There is an interesting debate over at SiliconValley.com about the right of researchers funded by Universities to make their IP Open Source. It's not at all simple. On one side Universities claiming their derive 5% of their Budget from IP licenses and it's vital for continued high level of 'Output,' on the other hand researcher who claim the public is billed twice by licensing the output."

Comments

where'd the funding come from?

[anothy]

in my mind, the eventual disposition of the IP rights depend on where the funding for the research came from. in public institutions, like state schools, this should be clear: they're public institutions, funded by public money, so the public should get the benefits. that's simply an evolution of the original concept of public educations: we give money to educational institutions so society as a whole can benefit. in private institutions, it's less clear, since the public money (almost all private universities still get lots of public money) is usually a minority. but lots of big companies help fund research in public schools and still expect to get the results, and that doesn't make sense.

A division of income sources

[erroneus]

The article doesn't address a pretty fundamental issue here.

Where and how is public funding being used? Where and how is private funding being used? Where are the overlaps in this case?

One could, of course, argue that since the research is being held within buildings paid for by public funds, using utilities paid for by public funds, that certainly the public holds an interest in all cases where such research is being carried out.

Private interests have an interest in seeing the work completed and the institutions themselves have an interest in licensing fees coming back to them as well.

This is a confusing problem. It's certainly not black and white now is it? If I were judge, however, I would rule in the public's interest. I view public funding as a moral obligation to return something to the public after accepting money from it. If private interests are allowed to influence where the results of research goes, then the private institution should be billed for the amount of public funds used during the course of the research.

As for the institution itself charging license fees... wow... that's an interesting one isn't it. To that I would answer, YES! Charge license fees all you want, but only to private interests and not to public ones.

Hrm... I'd say that was a fair assessment of this situation. If I were judge over this matter, I would rule in this way.

HOWEVER... we know that's not what is likely to happen is it?

Corporation A and B's lawyers will argue that public interests are served by providing a quality product for sale resulting from all of this research... :) Hyeah... get something for free and sell it back to us... yet that argument is made all the time and it makes sense to some judges in these cases. Bah!

Why can't they do both?

[alienmole]

I would think in many situations, universities could play both sides of the fence: make systems available as open source, but charge money to license code to companies that want to package it without source, in proprietary products (the SleepyCat approach that was discussed here recently).

This approach has a better chance of working for universities than it does for ordinary commercial enterprises, for at least two reasons:

1. The sort of software universities produce is more likely to be the kind of code that will be integrated into other systems, which lends itself to a dual licensing approach. Universities aren't selling shrinkwrapped software to consumers: they're selling more basic technology to companies that want to exploit it commercially. This could be perfectly suited to a dual licensing approach. Legitimate businesses, for the most part, are unlikely to try to base products on software that they don't have rights to.
2. Universities don't rely on software licensing for their entire livelihood, so if an open source strategy happens to result in somewhat lower revenues, they can handle it. However, open source may be one of the best and cheapest ways of "advertising" a university's software products, so these factors could balance out.

Besides, this is exactly the sort of issue on which we should look to universities to lead the way. Open source is an important form of cooperation, and its heritage is the very academic freedom and open sharing of information pioneered by universities. There are benefits to this cooperation that may not be completely in conflict with the profit motive; however, the truth of that claim can only be verified by those with sufficient vision to look beyond the next quarter's results. Universities are one of the few organizations which have both the vision and financial ability to do that. MIT's recent decision to make its course material freely available over the web is an example of this.

Computer Science should grow up.

[EndersGame]

Computer science is a young field. We can produce papers and show one result without having to back them up with anything other than our word. _SOME_ computer scientists have the courage to put out their source, but now it sounds like the universities are pressuring them not to.

Biology has a culture such that if you produce a new mutant line and write a paper about your discovery, ANYONE can ask you for your line. If you don't produce it, you will loose any respect you might have built up over the years. How do universities handle this?

Let's just imagine if computer science was this way. If you produce a paper, you had to be willing to give the code. If someone took your code and found it wanton or you were unwilling to give up your code, it would be assumed that you faked it. Ouch! That would suck. It would certainly slow down our field, but I think at some point this should be the case.

Commercially-oriented research is often crap

[ab315]

A lot of what passes for commercial research is crap. For example, the stomach-ulcer drug "Zantac" was one of the biggest-selling drugs of all-time with billions of dollars in revenue. A perfect example of the commercial research model. Unfortunately the drug was complete crap, because all it did was treat the symptoms of stomach ulcers and not the cause, so you had to take it forever while the ulcers would silently get worse, requiring increasing doses. Of course, this is a great revenue generator -- the drug seems to work in trials, because it relieves the pain but somehow those patients just need to keep coming back for more. There was ONE guy in the world, a pathologist from New Zealand, who actually found out the real cause of many stomach ulcers -- a simple bacterial infection of the stomach that could be cured with cheap generic antibiotics. He spent twenty years trying to get the medical community to listen to him, but was completely ignored! After all he couldn't be right because Zantac was so successful! Standard treatment for ulcers today is testing for the bacteria (H.Pylori) and antibiotics.

Commercial research maximises profits, not progress. People who make real breakthroughs won't be accepted in a commercial research model, because they don't conform to the norm -- after all if a researcher finds out that a billion-dollar drug is useless that is not going to look good for the university -- people have been killed for less. Any university which goes down that road is going to guarantee it ends up producing mediocre incremental advances. We don't need any more zantacs, we need smart people with intellectual freedom -- if we can't collectively afford that then we are doomed.