Public Money, Private Code

mizukami writes: "Salon.com is running a story about universities moving to profit from code they've developed, rather than release it into the public domain as has been the norm in the past. The story gives the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 as a leading cause."

Comments

blaming the blamers

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see, so a law from 20 years ago is responsible? Talk about grasping at straws!

Re:blaming the blamers

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that the Sherman Anti-Trust act is from 1890 and it is very popular with most slashdotters. Heck the Constitution, from which all laws evolve, is from 1787.

Fine by me

[NiftyNews]

That's okay by me, as long as they start including a little check-box on their Alumni Donation Forms that says "I've already donated my code, which you have sold at a profit."

Re:Fine by me

[Anonymous Coward]

My university did this on occassion.

They also paid fairly healthy royalties to the students involved.

So it ended up being good for everyone. The university got funding for its programs, and the students ended up with some extra cash and a really nice bullet-point on their resumes.

Ideally, U.S. schools would get sufficient funding, and wouldn't need to do this. Since that isn't the case, I think we could do a lot worse than the above.

Re:Fine by me

[HiThere]

When things are handled as ethically as you are reporting, then I suppose that it's ok. Coercion is never nice, but as long as things are honest and up-front ... well, you know what you're getting into.

There have, however, already been several reports of this being done in a quite unethical fashion, where the professor or the university takes both the fame and the cash. This is quite a different matter. A few people reported that they didn't even get good grades out of it. Reasons are up for speculation, but one possibility is that they protested too much.

Gross power imbalances are almost always bad, and one must be aware the the dominating party is quite likely to take unfair advantage of things. This is why "independent businessmen" were so respected up through the 1920's (and a bit of that lingers). They were the free men, and were not (usually) excessively domineering. Of course, there wasn't (usually) a gross disparity in power between them and their employees. At the end of the twenties jobs became scarse, the number of independent businessmen declined, and there *was* and increasing disparity in power "if you want a job, you take it on my terms, or you starve". Their respect declined noticably as their (relative) power rose. Note: This is just one thread of a tapestry, but I believe that it exists as I have stated.

Respect in this context is sort of a projection of what I believe would be the answers to the questions:
1) Is he a good person?
2) Do you like him?
3) Do you feel that you can trust him?
4) If you could gain by hurting him, and nobody else would know, would you do it?
5) If you could gain by hurting him, and he couldn't find out who did it, but your friends would know, would you do it?

The dabate of late has been...

[night_flyer]

we need more money for education... well now you have a choice, either they can sell the code they have developed, or taxes can go up...

Re:The dabate of late has been...

[sql*kitten]

we need more money for education... well now you have a choice, either they can sell the code they have developed, or taxes can go up...

If NCSA hadn't been quite so... obstructive, the university probably have gotten a huge donation from Netscape Corporation at the height of the bubble, which if they were smart they'd have converted to cash money. The same's true for UCB and Cisco... probably many other situations too, where companies are spun off, or founded by graduates using intellectual property.

Universities aren't built to make money directly be releasing products per se. You can't even count degree-granting as such; your money buys you the right to attend classes and sit exams, not to pass them. Universities also earn money by conducting research for industry, but the nature of research is that it's open-ended and ongoing, more like a time-and-materials contract (like a consulancy) than a units-shipped model (like a games house).

Universities can make money in the private sector, but they way to do it isn't to imitate corporations. Taking equity in a spin off to exploit research funded by the university itself from an internal budget in return for facilities space is a proven model.

Finally, this scenario is different in the UK, where the majority of university funding comes from the taxpayer. The license attached to that code should make it free for use by UK citizens, but charge a fee to everyone else.

Re:The dabate of late has been...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but these are universities. Each student pays $3,000 per year (and up) for the student to go. Universities don't get tax money, or at least nothing sizeable.

If it were high schools, it would be different. But the universities are already raping your wallet.

They are not hurting for money. Hell, the school I graduated from is putting up four new buildings this year alone. Another couple are already in the works after these are completed.

Still, I'm not completely against it although it should be the student's choice of how to release it.

Re:The dabate of late has been...

[mirko]

What if they are better at selling code their badly trained students developped than other unis at selling perfectly designed code ?

No... it would be worse.
Their code should remain Free as it is the only chance they have to attract investors otherwise.

Re:The dabate of late has been...

[Anonymous Coward]

no offense, but you have no idea what NCSA's involvement was in that whole thing. This was much more the University getting in the way than NCSA.

And no matter what happened, there was no way that the university would have gotten a donation from Netscape. That's because of the personalities involved before Netscape (really, Mosaic Corporation) got started. No freakin' way.

Re:The dabate of late has been...

[von Moltke]

Where do you live? In Florida, the public universities are heavily subsidized by the state legislature. I go to Florida Atlantic University, where the actual cost per credit hour is $352.88. Being a Florida resident, though, I only pay $89.96 per hour because the state pays the rest. Multiply an average of 12 hours per student by about 15,000 Florida residents at the school, and thats a state subsidy of over $47 million. The school's total budget is about $180 million. The school gets additional state funding for a few other things, but this is the larget chunk. In fact, we're so tied to state funding that an $8 million dollar reduction in the subsidy has caused serious money problems.

Re:The dabate of late has been...

[ichimunki]

either they can sell the code they have developed, or taxes can go up.

Bzzt! Logical argument violation code #4af1: 'False Dichotomy'.

Other options would include eliminating government spending for things like faulty missile defense systems or the NEA and using the savings to spend on education instead.

Re:The dabate of late has been...

[Anonymous Coward]

Other options would include eliminating government spending for things like faulty missile defense systems

Bzzt! Logical argument violation code #31eg67: 'Idealistic Banter'. The day when the military has to hold bake sales is when Bill Gates starts handing out personally autographed copies of Debian Linux.

Re:The dabate of late has been...

[Lemmy Caution]

Do you have any idea how tiny the NEA (and the associated NEH) is? Why this gets trotted out as an example of government waste is a mystery to me.

Re:The dabate of late has been...

[ichimunki]

It was an example. And frankly, using the "that budget is so small" argument is flawed because most of the budgets that one might consider are small when taken as distinct entities. And the constituents who benefit from those budgets will always scream about priorities. But the fact remains that we can't simply accept the mantra "sell stuff or raise taxes". It's not true. We can also examine the existing spending, priority rank the programs (heck a simple computer program could help create a dependency based prioritization system), add any new proposoals or adjust priorities to fit situational need, then adjust spending accordingly.

FWIW, I don't want new taxes. In fact, if my tax money is being used to fund research that I don't benefit from freely, then I am being overtaxed and I want my money back.

Legalities?

[iGawyn]

I know that Cisco had some messy issues about privatizing their work on the routers that they did while still at college, wouldn't this fall under the same category of attempting to privatize and earn money off of research/work done with the state's money at a state-owned facility?

I think that, if the internet had been privatized when it was first created, we wouldn't see anywhere near the amount of growth and diversity we have today.

Gawyn

Re:Legalities?

[nanojath]

I don't necessarily say it is right (particularly universally right) but this kind of thing is far from uncommon, at least in the physical sciences: patented chemicals, processes, even genes. The Cisco issue isn't really relevant - that was a matter of a dipute of whether a now private company (Cisco) was utilizing technology or knowledge that in truth belonged to the university.

There are two sides to this - on the plus side, I think it is great if a university can generate a badly needed revenue stream from the work they do. On the other hand, any privitazation of science reduces access, public value, and collaborative potential of that science.

Another issue not much adressed is that undergrads and graduate students often get screwed in the process - experiencing little reward from the product of their labor.

Well, if it keeps tuition prices down...

[Anonymous Coward]

Word is college tuition will be $200,000 a YEAR in 18 years... Maybe this could help keep that to a more reasonable number?

It only makes sense

[Wind_Walker]

Nowadays, it only makes sense for educational institutions to start making money off of their programs. Think about it: For the "serious" programmers, they go and get their PhDs in Computer Science, and then what? Get paid to be a code monkey? I don't think so. They go and teach.

However, teaching isn't all it's cracked up to be anymore. With the government cutting the money for higher education ($100 billion last year) and with the ever-tightening restrictions imposed by Affirmative Action (raising dropout rates to 25% in some fields) it's no wonder that schools are starting to find ways to make money any way they can.

It may be going off on a rant, but it's time that we take money from the military and start giving it to the school systems (especially publically-funded schools like universities are) because otherwise, the U.S.A. is going to become a group of complete loser jocks who couldn't tell you the difference between a hole in the ground and the goatse.cx guy.

It was only a matter of time...

Re:It only makes sense

[Karmageddon]

Nowadays, it only makes sense for educational institutions to start making money off of their programs....It may be going off on a rant, but it's time that we take money from the military and start giving it to the school systems...

you are going off on a rant. The problem here is not how much money universities need or get, the problem is if the fruits of research are proprietary and locked up, they will benefit society much less. There would be no internet today if it had been proprietary. Sure, we'd have instant phone messaging... whooo hooo!

Re:It only makes sense

[NerdSlayer]

It may be going off on a rant, but it's time that we take money from the military and start giving it to the school systems (especially publically-funded schools like universities are) because otherwise, the U.S.A. is going to become a group of complete loser jocks who couldn't tell you the difference between a hole in the ground and the goatse.cx guy

That's simply not true. Very few public schools are research intensive. Most of the time they are private schools like CMU or MIT or Ivy League schools which are also in operation solely through tution, alumni giving, and proceeds from research.

As great as it would be to come up with some horrible conspiracy about how Microsoft has double agents working in University Administration, it's simply not the way it works.

The only way you can give great research opportunities to undergrads and have world class professors teaching intro CS classes at someplace like MIT is... tada: MONEY.

I think the real difference here is that most technologies were always spun off before with some sort of licensing deal to develop a product. The reason aarpanet made it through is because there wasn't any obvious indication of how huge it would be. Most "old school" engineering research is often sold to another company or a few professors might spin off a company to develop a product from the technology.

Microsoft didn't do this.

Re:It only makes sense

[Unknown Bovine Group]

Had his predecessors understood how huge the Internet would turn out to be, Hoskins figures, they would surely have licensed the protocols, sold the rights to a corporation and collected a royalty for the U.C. Regents on Internet usage years into the future.

This kind of logic is coming out of a university? Had they licensed and created royalty hassles attached to TCP/IP, it would have been largely ignored and we'd still be trying to decide if we should subscribe to CompuServ or AOL (which would of course be closed, independent networks).

Re:It only makes sense

[peripatetic_bum]

... with the ever-tightening restrictions imposed by Affirmative Action (raising dropout rates to 25% in some fields) it's no wonder that schools are starting to find ways to make money any way they can.

I'm sorry but i simply cant let this statement go by. Do you have any proff for this statement?

As for the idea of universities making money, I think that we are witnessing the further progression of a wrong headed idea that "ALL THINGS SHOULD BE RUN LIKE A BUSINESS." Recently, Penn voters voted down a plan to privatize schools. The questions becomes why would making a profit help education?

It must be made clear that SCHOOLS ARE THERE TO TEACH, NOT TO MAKE A PROFIT.

For some reason, many people inclduing this poster simply arent critical thinkers about what "Making a Profit" means, what values it implies. Hell, just today Argentina told the "free market system" to fuck off as it has left the country penniless. Lets be clear, the free market system is anything but free to most people of the world. It is made especially to let a certain group of people get rich, to hell with everyone else. I think this poster fits right into this group, esp with his post i am responding to.

Anyway, thanks for reading,

Re:It only makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Compuserve or AOL? I'd soon learn to speak binary and call up a modem making sqeaky sounds.

Re:It only makes sense

[TheGreenLantern]

It may be going off on a rant, but it's time that we take money from the military and start giving it to the school systems

[Rant#2]Haven't you heard? We're at War Against Evil (tm). It's vitally important for every American to support the War Against Evil (tm) in every way they can, and you suggesting that money should be taken away from military contractors in Texas...errrr, The American Armed Forces The Greatest Fighting Force In The World is unacceptable.

In these Times of Tragedy, we cannot afford to question the leadership of President George W. Bush, Who Made a Really Good Speech And Is Defending America, lest the terrorists win by dividing us as a country. I'm sure you now realize that Erradicating Evil From The Face Of The Planet is more important that trivial concerns like educating the next generation of Americans.

Re:It only makes sense

[ErikZ]

Um, for the past 8 years the military has been doing nothing BUT trimming down.

The biggest cost sink in the government today is social security. Maybe we should kill that program eh?

Re:It only makes sense

[phat_rat]

First off,
I dont believe that the college administration have any grounds to do any such thing. For it is not they themselves who have created the code.I think that it should be up to the programmers themselves, not administration.Much like a hmm.. DEFUCKINGMOCRACY.

Secondly,
Fuck you.Take money away from welfare and other such lost causes.Dont take it out of the sword, take it out of the mouth.Hence encouraging people to get educated so they can make money, and then they go to better schools, hence utopianly fixing alot of problems.

Okay?

That was fucked up.But who cares?

Re:It only makes sense

[jandrese]

Very few public schools are research intensive.

Really? Back when I was in college the professors ALL had research projects on the side. It seems that part of being a tenured professor is that you have to do research and get yourself published, etc...

Now most undergrads aren't doing research, mostly because the system isn't set up for them to be researchers. Many (especially in the engineering and CS degress) barely have enough time to finish their homework/projects/work in the evening, much less do exaustive research in some new field. Post graduate students naturally have plenty of research projects.

Still, one thing that became painfully obvious after awhile is just how much money it takes to run a school, and how little of it there was to go around. I'm not surprised in the least to find them looking for more things to sell.

Re:It only makes sense

[Surak]

That's simply not true. Very few public schools are research intensive. Most of the time they are private schools like CMU or MIT or Ivy League schools which are also in operation solely through tution, alumni giving, and proceeds from research.

Hmmm? University of Michigan, Purdue University, Wayne State University, Michigan State University, and the University of California (especially Berkely) are all public and are all research intensive universities, to name five right off the top of my head. (UCB is where we get the infamous BSD-descended operating systems, btw).

As great as it would be to come up with some horrible conspiracy about how Microsoft has double agents working in University Administration, it's simply not the way it works.

FWIW, Microsoft has a long-standing history of recruiting from major universities. Microsoft and Bill Gates both have a long-standing history of donating money to schools. C'mon, you can't tell me there isn't SOME favoritism in there. :)

The reason aarpanet made it through is because there wasn't any obvious indication of how huge it would be.

ARPANet/DARPANet was a military project, not a university project. DARPA - Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. Duh. The universities wouldn't have had a choice.

Microsoft didn't do this.

Nobody said they did, but as an aside, isn't just FUN to blame Microsoft for everything? Had a bad day at work? Microsoft. Couldn't find a parking spot? Microsoft. World Trade Center explodes? Microsoft. See how fun it is? :-P

Re:It only makes sense

[goldspider]

Trust me, educational institutions are already making enough money on their own without selling the fruits of students' labor. But then, they've been doing that for a long time.

What many people apparently don't realize is that alot of research conducted by universities is subsidised by various interest groups. The research that comes out of these programs becomes property of the University and is passed on to whoever funded the research. The only thing the students (who did most of the work) receive in compensation is 3 or 4 credits.

I doubt this is true about CS and related programs at Penn State (where I recently graduated from), and to my knowledge, they do not claim ownership of students' code. But don't get me wrong, they stick it to us in another way.

Students in "non-engineering technology majors" are now assessed a $750 surcharge per semester to (supposedly) cover costs of their respective majors. I don't know exactly how many students this includes, but you can bet Penn State is making a boatload of money from it.

So no, we don't need to take money from the military to dump into an already greedy education system.

Re:It only makes sense

[br0therben]

I agree that the USA has had some serious problems with educational funding for public schools, however throwing more money at ANY public institution is rarely a guarantee that quality will increase...or even that the funds will be allocated properly. Allowing Universities to sell code is fraught with potential problems, however allowing them to make a buck off of something is not the worst of all evils. In fact it might give CS departments the prestige that many business colleges have (at my Alma, the business college was by far the wealthiest department, though the exact reason for that is a matter of conjecture) - those departments that make the most money tend to have larger staffs and better programs.
Having worked for the local public school system (in Cincinnati), I shudder when I hear the much-touted "we need more money for education." Bah! We need to actually SPEND our money on education instead of special-interest programs, babysitting solutions (security measures for students who should have been be booted years ago), drug programs that don't work, child care for the urban masses, etc. And yes,the mentality of the inner-city public-schools is slowly working its way into higher education (if it didn't start there).
However, I'm not sure allowing Unis to profit from student labor (which is basically what we're talking about, right?) will justify other, more serious implications. Will universities get to the point where students will have to sign NDAs and non-competes for after graduation? Will wealthier institutions pursue graduates who seem to have "borrowed" bits of code they worked on in CS101 during their freshman years? That kind of scares me...

Re:It only makes sense

[zangdesign]

I'd definitely go along with killing off social security, but I want back the money that I've paid into it.

Oh, wait - The government already spent that years ago. Don't you just love government sanctioned Ponzi schemes?

Re:It only makes sense

[sql*kitten]

The biggest cost sink in the government today is social security. Maybe we should kill that program eh?

I know that was meant to be a rhetorical question, but given that one cause of unemployment is lack of qualifications, in the medium to long term diverting welfare money into education does make a lot of sense.

To take it a step further, since education up until 18 is freely available, perhaps dropping out of school should reduce eligbility for state aid.

Re:It only makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you have a free and undivided country? Even if it would be as simple as someone having an actual(tm) opinion, and some schmuck coming on t.v. saying how can you do that? You are dividing the country! They spend a lot of time talking about a united America, and then when you don't agree wiht what they do or say, they critisize and say you are dividing the country. I think a little division is healthy, or at least WAY better with what they want, which is a cattle drive. Makes it easier to sleep at the wheel if the vehicle is on cruise control and you are on a straight road.

Re:It only makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

"SCHOOLS ARE THERE TO TEACH, NOT TO MAKE A PROFIT. "

By the same token, you can offer the best education if you can afford the best teachers which implies competition which in turn implies capitalism and profits.

"Hell, just today Argentina told the "free market system" to fuck off as it has left the country penniless. "

You are so shallow.
It was not "capitalism" that left Argentina penniless, it was overgrown and badly managed government.

Re:It only makes sense

[eugene ts wong]

You are absolutely right. If you look at the standard of living in US and Canada for the average "oppressed" person, we can hardly complain.

I would rather live here with the possibility of failure than in a controlled market system, where there *might* be a chance of success.

Re:It only makes sense

[eugene ts wong]

You said, "Will universities get to the point where students will have to sign NDAs and non-competes for after graduation? Will wealthier institutions pursue graduates who seem to have 'borrowed' bits of code they worked on in CS101 during their freshman years? That kind of scares me...".

It kind of scares me too. I never really thought about it. Perhaps a good alternative is to require that all work be copyrighted by their owner(s). This will prevent the teachers from forcing things into the public domain just to get a good mark.

Don't get me wrong, there will always be ways around this, but every little bit helps.

In general, I'm very in favour of being able to sell work. The students and the universities should be *allowed* to make money so that they can pay for tuition or other expenses.

Re:It only makes sense

[jacobito]

>with the ever-tightening restrictions imposed by
>Affirmative Action (raising dropout rates to 25%
>in some fields) it's no wonder that schools are
>starting to find ways to make money any way
>they can.

Please provide a citation for this claim. I don't think it's fair to post what at least appears to be off-the-cuff flamebait like this without any supporting details.

Respectfully,
jacob

Re:It only makes sense

[peripatetic_bum]

By the same token, you can offer the best education if you can afford the best teachers which implies competition which in turn implies capitalism and profits.


Wrong again. Public school should be likened more to basic research. Basic research is funded for the sake of being able to do basic research. Public education should be funded for the sake of public education. In both cases, we can not predict what specifically will prove most beneficial when we fund it, thus it makes no sense to fund it like a business. What I am trying to say is no one "betted" on the internet and wanted to make it a business when it first started.

You are so shallow.
I put my name by my opinions?
are you not so shallow that you go AC?

It was not "capitalism" that left Argentina penniless, it was overgrown and badly managed government.

Once again, you seem to not get exactly what capitalism really is. I would argue that capitalism causing bas government: Ever heard of Bail-Out in the 80's. MMmmm, thats real capitalism, that was fucked up governement too, buddy

Re:It only makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why is the tobacco industry still in business? The actions of the tobacco industry has killed far more people than terrorists can ever hope to. Which is the greater evil here? Terrorism (thousands of deaths) or Tobacco (hundreds of thousands of deaths)?

Not suprised

[EmbeddedHead]

Is anyone realy suprised by this?
In an age where public funding for higher education, in the US, is on the decline, public institutions will do what it takes to remain open.

Re:Not suprised

[Mononoke]

In an age where public funding for higher education, in the US, is on the decline, public institutions will do what it takes to remain open.

That would be ok if the money is used wisely, but this is the real world. They'll redo the landscaping and remodel the administration building (Hell, nevermind remodel! Build a new one!) before they pay instructors and TAs what they are worth, and maintain labs reasonably.

Hell, there can never be enough art museums on campus, can there? Notice how only 2 out of the cluster of six photos on this typical college home page seem to having anything to do with education.

Re:Not suprised

[jsmyth]

The same thing has been going on for years in the fields of materials and chemistry anyway. And where do you think the major advances in biotech until recently have come from?

Medicine is the same. Only lately has the majority of new wonderdrugs come from industry - major research has come from hospitals and universitys for a long time, and the resulting technology has been licensed. Only this time it's software, "pure" information. There is no real difference, except perhaps in the duplicability of results: anyone can copy a program, but not everyone can copy the AIDS drugs.

Re:Not suprised

[grrlygeeky]

Well, that is a big difference. Information is only moderately isomorphic to "goods and services" and should not be treated as exact equals in the economic system. With the technology of distributing information only now beginning to approach the ideal, we're going to have to figure out how to deal with the economics of information... only it's self-affecting, since the technology of distributing information itself is composed of information. Very complex. The shoe that fits on industry's foot and biotechnology's foot with debatable success is clearly not going to fit on information technology's foot... at least without cutting off any toes...

Re:Not suprised

[Anonymous Coward]

What decline?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0 20 1030221jan03.story

Quoting from this article " Overall spending by the state's public schools has gone up 45 percent in five years."
That is way above inflation levels, and I would assume it is true for most states.
So where do you get that notion of decreased spending?

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Had someone done a cost/benefit analysis on Linux, it would never have been created. After all, you can't make money on something that doesn't cost anything, now can you? And universities, like everyone else, are trying to make money..

I don't see the problem here - as long as they pay back, with interest, the federal grant they got at the beginning of the project.

No, its time we take money away from the JOCKS

[night_flyer]

and allocate it towards education, in case you didnt notice, we kind of need the military...

Re:No, its time we take money away from the JOCKS

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you bet some serious cash on Nebraska to cover? The only other thing that could explain such a comment is stupidity.

Re:No, its time we take money away from the JOCKS

[Anonymous Coward]

that was supposed to be a reply to this:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=25645&cid=27 84 809

Re:No, its time we take money away from the JOCKS

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, you need it so that you can pound poor, already-devastated countries like Afghanistan "back to the stone-age".

Why not?

[Tinfoil]

Hell, if the student(s) that wrote the code get a significant cut of the cashish then I can't see a damn thing wrong with it. I wish my school had done that, so that I didn't have this huge OSAP (student) loan to pay off.

Not likely...

[Svartalf]

They're doing this because they're trying to make these things massive profit centers. Problem is, while colleges can be profitable, they're supposed to be more of an investment in the future, not research mills. But then, we've apparently forgotten a lot of things with the people with money in search of more money.

More money for equipment and research..

[Manic Miner]

I don't know about america, but here in the UK most universities are fairly tight on cash as the government doesn't have enough money to go around. Reciently there has been the introduction of tuition fees to UK universities in an attempt to increase the funding available.

Now Universities have a lot of one thing.. talent. Why shouldn't they use the inventions and intelectual property that they own to generate more money to improve facilities and teaching quality?

Yes, in the past universities have produced decent free products that have encouraged development and standards. But this doesn't mean that it won't happen any more. Each invention needs to be considered and dealt with appropriately. Some inventions will be best as open free code / standards, some will make the university in question money if sold.

So long as the money is re-invested to allow the university to grow then I think this is a great thing.

Re:More money for equipment and research..

[ptrourke]

Recently there has been the introduction of tuition fees to UK universities in an attempt to increase the funding available.

All US public universities charge tuition, at least to out of state students, some of them well into the 5 figures per year (dollars, not pounds) to out of state students, and well into the 4 figures per year for in-state students. The only exception I can think of is the California state university system (e.g., UC Berkley), where IIRC tuition is free for state residents.

Then there are the fees. At one time, the fees for attending many state universities were actually higher for in-state students than the tuition (e.g., $2,500 fees and $1,500 tuition for one semester).

Re:More money for equipment and research..

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope-- UC Berkeley costs ~$5000/yr for CA residents.

Re:More money for equipment and research..

[ptrourke]

Thanks for the correction. Someone should mod parent this up to be on same level as my post.

Open source, or truely free?

[dirk]

This article seems to be stuck on the whole "they should release it open source like Linux" idea. I agree that Universities shouldn't be privatizing their ideas and making gobs of money off them by selling them to private interests. But I think they should give them away so everyone can use them, and the only way to do that is to make them public domain (or possibly something like the BSD license). I know everyone will say the GPL is the best way to go, but as they article said, this is for the public good, and that includes people who don't want to use the GPL. If you want to use this code is a closed source app you wouldn't be able to benefit from this (and that includes individuals as well as corporations). I think if they are going to release it, make it PD or BSD, that way the greatest number of people can benefit from it. GPL is a good license, but it's not the freedom something like this requires. This requires the greatest amount of freedom, not freedom with restrictions that your stuff has to be free as well.

Re:Open source, or truely free?

[arkanes]

Well, it all boils down to what your definition of "public good". I, for one, don't think that "public good" EVER means "let someone else make money". "Limited-term monopoly rights to recoup development costs", sure, but never "Give away revenue sources to industry". How exactly is the public good served by this? Granted, the GPL doesn't allow total freedom - it's more along the lines of P2P sharing. If you want to benefit from work funded by public money, you are required to donate back to the community. Now, the GPL isn't the license to end all licenses, and I'm not a free software bigot like RMS, but I think it (or something like it) should be the norm for public resources.

Re:Open source, or truely free?

[bfree]

Well if I was making this decision, I would state that ALL code MUST be released GPL AND then the university itself can decide if it would like to release it under any other license. Some code would be released under no other licenses (not much I would suspect) while most code would probably also be released under some other licenses such as BSD (if the uni doesn't want money) or a licensing deal to indivdual applicants where the university would charge them to give them the software under another license. If this happened ALL software developed in any university would be available for all to use provided that they redistribute any modifications they make to the original code, and each university could decide either globally or per project if they wished to try and make money from it by allowing other uses of the code. If it is release PD or BSD only than the university cannot make any money from it. Say that MS wants some code written in a Uni, but they aren't willing to take it under the GPL, then they will have to crawl up to the university and say "we would like a XXX licensed copy of the software, what can we do for you to get it?". The universities should have the power to control how money is made of their work (and to take a share if they wish) but they should also have to give as open access to the information/code as possible while not losing the right to control proprietary money making off their software. How much could TCP-IP have made by now?

Re:Open source, or truely free?

[Ded Bob]

Another possiblity is how SoftUpdates was handled. It was released as a shareware--I do not really remember the exact license--project, but after a couple of years was released under a BSD license. This allowed money to be made, yet the code was open sourced for everyone to use after the couple of years.

Re:Open source, or truely free?

[bfree]

Why? What benefit does Shareware have for anyone? What benefit is university research if the only way to use it is with their own shareware system? How does shareware benefit the people who (to varying degrees in various countries) pay for the university system? How does shareware let the actual authors (say PhD or Masters or Degree candidates) continue to use the software they developed and reap benefits from it? My idea is to ensure that everyone can see the universities research and even use it completely Freely BUT if they wish to distribute a modified version and NOT release the source to the modifications (i.e. build on the universities work for monetary gain) then they have to negotiate a deal with the university (which can say yes, no, bsd only, gpl only or $xxxxxxxxx).

Re:Open source, or truely free?

[msouth]

I have posted this elsewhere on this article, sorry for the redundancy. I used to think that all govt funded work should be released under GPL, but I eventually realized that "taxpayers" include "people that want to be able to make money on software", so it seems to me that the only way really be fair is to put it in the public domain and then let everyone develop from there. There is no reason to favor GPL'ers over BSD'ers at the regulatory level. The tax money comes from everyone, so everyone should have equal access to the results to use as they wish. I wrote this up in the debate on siliconvalley.com with Mundie and Perens. I saved a copy here:

http://www.fulcrum.org/features/public_domain.ht ml

Re:Open source, or truely free?

[Ded Bob]

How does shareware let the actual authors (say PhD or Masters or Degree candidates) continue to use the software they developed and reap benefits from it?

Are they the ones that reap the benefits or is it the University they work for?

The source for SoftUpdates was always there for everyone to read. For commercial-use, you had to pay. Afterwards, everyone was able to use or develop it freely without even the fear of license collision.

Re:Open source, or truely free?

[bfree]

I think it is far more benficial to allow commercial use IF the user is going to distribute any changes they make then to discourage commercial use by insisting on payment.

Re:Open source, or truely free?

[dirk]

Well if I was making this decision, I would state that ALL code MUST be released GPL AND then the university itself can decide if it would like to release it under any other license. Some code would be released under no other licenses (not much I would suspect) while most code would probably also be released under some other licenses such as BSD (if the uni doesn't want money) or a licensing deal to indivdual applicants where the university would charge them to give them the software under another license. If this happened ALL software developed in any university would be available for all to use provided that they redistribute any modifications they make to the original code, and each university could decide either globally or per project if they wished to try and make money from it by allowing other uses of the code. If it is release PD or BSD only than the university cannot make any money from it. Say that MS wants some code written in a Uni, but they aren't willing to take it under the GPL, then they will have to crawl up to the university and say "we would like a XXX licensed copy of the software, what can we do for you to get it?". The universities should have the power to control how money is made of their work (and to take a share if they wish) but they should also have to give as open access to the information/code as possible while not losing the right to control proprietary money making off their software. How much could TCP-IP have made by now?

The problem is that the GPL is not truely free. It is "free" with restrictions. People seem to forget there are actual individuals who want to put out non-GPL software, as well as corps. If something is paid for with public money, it should be FREE, that is free for anyone. That includes people who want to GPL, people who don't want to GPL, and corporations (since they pay taxes as well, they have to be considered). I think the GPL is a fine license if you want to use it, but people shouldn't be forced into using it. If this software is paid for with public money, it should be free for anyone to use in any application they want, and that should include releasing closed-course software. The GPL just doesn't allow that kind of freedom.

Re:Open source, or truely free?

[istartedi]

Amen brother. Requiring proprietary software developers to pay Federal taxes, and then refusing to allow them to benefit from Federal products is inherently prejudicial.

Re:Open source, or truely free?

[rana]

I think you fail to understand how the GPL works in this case. The GPL'd code is free for use in non-proprietary software. If a company wants to use the code in a proprietary product, they can license it from the university. The university makes money, the private company gets the code it wants, and the public gets the benefit of free code. Everybody's happy!

If you don't think GPL works this way, just read the GPL. Lots of proprietary products contain GPL code, but you can be sure they paid for the privilege (or they'll get in trouble).

Re:Open source, or truely free?

[bfree]

To further my own point in a slightly clearer way (isn't the sub-conscious mind a wonderful thing):

A University is first and foremost (IMHO) a place of learning for the benefit of it's society NOT the benefit of the indivdual students or even the student body or faculty or ... The University exists to further learning for everyone from Einstein to Technicians. It is about gathering a body of knowledge (in human and archived form) and then teaching and exploring it. By teaching you distribute knowledge, and the taught can go on to create knowledge as the teachers (or other employees) hope to. It's primary purpose is to teach and create the new teachings NOT to make secrets. Any secrets deny a University access to it's fundamental desire, to teach anything and everything it can/could/should.

If a university chooses nearly any other license than the GPL (perhaps I am slightly blind to any genuine alternatives which offer similar protections?) for it's software, it offers the oportunity for a secret to come into existance which it cannot teach, and even more gallingly the teaching could be how their creation is actually used (think Kerberos)! Now if a University is to allow this to happen, it should demand compensation appropriate to the threat against it's nature. A PD or BSD license may be completly harmless to many kinds of software, but it should be up to the authors to decide how a work gets set Free if at all!

A University has a debt to society, without society there is no University. When a University creates something, it should have a duty to share the creation with society which means its students, their peers and anyone who wants to know, worldwide (and if anyone believes they would know what they know now without cross-planetary distributions of knowledge they are mad).

Re:Open source, or truely free?

[HiThere]

I feel that it should all be released GPL. I have no disagreement with any who wish to release it under other licenses as well, no matter what the other licenses are (including both BSD and monoplize private). If they don't release it under the GPL, then they are stealing from the common weal. If they also release it under another license, that's fine. They have already paid back the loan, so now turning a profit is ok. But no privatized development should be subsidized with public money. (I.e., they can release the same code under multiple licenses, but if they want to develop it further and then release that privately, the futher development should be done totally with private money.)

Re:Open source, or truely free?

[msouth]

The rationale for requiring it to be put in the public domain (or BSD, whatever) is that, even though _you feel_ that it should all be GPL, other people, who also pay taxes, and therefore also supported the development, do not.

For example, some kid with a great idea for an improvement on public-fundingly-developed technology X and wants to make a business out of it ought to get the same change to make a proprietary addition to the public domain code and run it as a business as the GPL crowd gets to try to put improvements under a freedom-guaranteeing license. Why should the GPL people get favored treatmant? If the code that the public funds goes into the public domain, everyone gets an equal shot at pressing their business plan/ideology/whatever.

It doesn't prevent people from making additions to the code and putting their additions under the GPL. It doesn't prevent some random individual from making proprietary additions and charging for his work. (He won't be able to make trivial changes and lock everyone out--everyone already has exactly the same starting point that he had, and if all he did was add a couple lines then anyone else could do the same. If he did do something really great, he ought to have the option of charging for his work, which he could not realstically do if the code was only available to him under the GPL.)

One more important point--at the moment, the law is bad in both your eyes and mine--nobody gets anything unless the grantee happens to be generous. So, even if you would prefer the GPL, there is an advantage to you to support putting it in the public domain, because at least then you would be able to get it and make GPL'd additions.

Wonder why....

[cscx]

The networked society we live in is in large part a gift from the University of California to the world. In the 1980s, computer scientists at Berkeley working under contract for the Defense Department created an improved version of the Unix operating system, complete with a networking protocol called the TCP/IP stack. Available for a nominal fee, the operating system and network protocol grew popular with universities and became the standard for the military's Arpanet computer network. In 1992, Berkeley released its version of Unix and TCP/IP to the public as open-source code, and the combination quickly became the backbone of a network so vast that people started to call it, simply, "the Internet."

Ever wonder if it's because the folks at Berkeley were a bunch of tree-hugging hippies? I mean, c'mon... of course they would release it for free... it's all about [note: use best Tommy Chong voice...] "peace and love, man."

Remember, two similar things came out of Berkeley: LSD and BSD. Coincidence? I think not.

Re:Wonder why....

[Anonymous Coward]

"In the 1980s, computer scientists at Berkeley working under contract for the Defense Department ..."

As Cheech Marin might say "Oh wow man, you mean they actually got paid? R-e-a-l money? Far out!"

Um .. tax dollars, funneled through the DoD, paid for that research in a University largely supported by public funds. The University didn't "give" anything to anybody that didn't already belong to the public by virtue of being fully funded by tax bucks.

Step back from the "spin" and follow the money. Universities aren't hurting except where horribly mis-managed. Look at coaching salaries. Yeah ... I "feel your pain". NOT!

Meanwhile the US is gradually slipping from the cutting edge of technology and teaching methods to the cut bait bucket of 2nd place in a number of educational metrics.

Look at the whole picture. The research was paid for with public funds ... front to back. The public owns it. Front to back. End of discussion.

Use the GPL!

[WebMasterJoe]

If professors want their code to be open source, why not build off a GPL'ed project? Even something as simple as the GNU cp command could be used in most apps, I would think, and if you use GPL'ed code in your project, the project source must be available.

Re:Use the GPL!

[Anonymous Coward]

In that case the university would refuse to release it at all. If I were in charge of some university's intellectual property department, I would make it unversity policy to release all code under a specific license. If someone creates a project based on GPL code, I would let it sit and refuse to release it. I know that seems pretty selfish, but it is the way universitys can make money. Just think of this: the more money the university makes, the better my education will be.

Blame the patent bandwagon

[Crimplene Prakman]

Two causes for this:

• The move toward more public education, including underfunding,
  
  and
• The drive towards EVERYTHING being patented in the software world

It's no coincidence that we in the /. community are here sharing opinion and working with open source, and are also interested in education. We share a thirst for knowledge and philosophy. But in this day where software is such big money, education costs are spiralling, funding is staying constant or dropping, it makes sense to the managers of these institutions to get back something from industry by patenting and licensing technologies they develop. Like the PARC and IBM labs have been doing for a while. Yes, it feels like college to work there, but now the commercial aspect is pervasive.

Perhaps, when governments figure out that not all software patents are sensible, then we'll see a return to a more sharing, less "grabby" attitude in the knowledgemakers.

Re:Blame the patent bandwagon

[jsmyth]

Hang on: Education shouldn't hinge on funding! It's there to develop PEOPLE, not MONEY. When money gets involved, corruption follows. What education needs is decent management, with the right levels of integrity and the correct "philosophy", not just idealistic open-source types, but the same ideas that made Socrates and Plato the giants they were, the same goal of people development, teaching people to think.

Re:Blame the patent bandwagon

[Crimplene Prakman]

I know - I work in education, both at the consumer/training level, and at the academic university level. The contrast in management styles is amazing - the priorities are completely dipolar. On one side, you have "the almighty buck", we teach whatever you'll pay us to stand there and waffle about, on the other you have "the almighty word", we teach whatever we as bastions of the community agree you need to know in order to develop your foundation skills in your chosen discipline.

The issue is one of management, but it's also one of expectation. The world is getting more global, more capitalist, more liberal. One of the libertarian ideas is "if you don't like it, get a different one". In order for educational institutions to survive in a liberal market, they need to be attractive to the best candidates, in order to turn out as many overacheivers as possible, in order to attract the best candidates, etc. Market forces exist even at the idealogical pillars of society.

And what's the best way to facilitate such attraction? You got it, funding. And how do you improve funding? Either attract private funding (graduates, important donors who like/need the press), or hire a business-savvy funding manager. And what's the best way for a business-savvy funding manager to raise funds? Sell product.

The only product (other than education) that a university can sell is technology. Innovation. Knowledge-creation. And the reason it is attractive to sell it is because of our bizarre legal idea that anything I thought of patenting can be patented, which means anyone with an idea (even if fairly common) can patent it. Now, if the whole world of industry is already doing it, and making silly money in a high-profile way, then OF COURSE a fund-raising manager is going to see it as an early opportunity! It's selling knowledge creation! It's freely available on campus! It won't detract slightly from the research of the PhD students, and will likely attract more as students see the $$$.

Of course this doesn't even broach the sticky subject of market forces at the student level, i.e. do I as a student choose a project with industrial value, something patentable? or do I choose something worthwhile to society, and knowledge in general? Alas, that's a question for another day...

Re:Blame the patent bandwagon

[Patoski]

But in this day where software is such big money, education costs are spiralling, funding is staying constant or dropping, it makes sense to the managers of these institutions to get back something from industry by patenting and licensing technologies they develop.

The big problem is that when you charge industry for something that cost is simply filtered down to the consumer. So basically every tax payer. paying twice for the same innovation. Once through the funding universities with our tax dollars and yet again through goods we consume from companies that pay to license these technologies. Universities taking my tax dollars to conduct research which turns right around and forces me to pay some company even more money angers me greatly. I thought that universtities are for the open exchange of ideas and the education of students. Boy was I ever naive. >=P Perhaps its time to rethink our whole university system? Our higher education system is *really* screwed up! In lots of large public universities there are literally hundreds of students in ONE class which the professor doesn't even teach. Getting a teaching award at many state universities is often the kiss of death (I've heard this from several professors). Our universities should exist primarily to *teach* not be an extension the R&D dept for companies. This isn't how things should work people.

public money as WELL?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I heard, you guys paid $30k+/year, whereas in Europe your course really is paid for mostly/all by the state. For e.g., at my uni, there is a gov commitment to pay at least 3/4 if you are UK resident.

I've always seen American uni's as just another business. Or are they so incompetent with funding that they claim to need $30k per student (a lot more than this country claims as being a full yearly course cost!) PLUS government funding?

If the Gov gives the occasional grant.. surely that's no diff to giving the occasional grant to (random example) the airline industry? It doesn't guarantee all taxpayers free plane tickets.

Of course, from this you can argue one of two things -- 1. "exactly, Uni's are private businesses, in fact, the government should stop giving them money altogether" or 2. "exactly, Uni's are public entities, in which case they should be equally accessible regardless of income, like libraries". Anything else is inconsistent.

Re:public money as WELL?

[Anonymous Coward]

and how much do you pay in taxes?

you pay the whole amount, and so does your neighbor, who doesnt go to a university...

Re:public money as WELL?

[Anonymous Coward]

If corporations and charging for stuff is to bad, when why is America winning? Why do people in other contries ALL OVER THE PLANET have lower living-standard and lower salaries? Because capitalism is so bad?

Re:public money as WELL?

[nosferatu1001]

erm, you don't have the highest per capita income fuckwit, or even the highest standards of living

and yes, capitalism, in its purest, most greedy form, is wrong. Your standard of living is only - briefly mind - maintained by raping the rest of the world. When they run out, yer fucked

Hence exceedingly inefficient US car engines for example

Re:public money as WELL?

[koekepeer]

come visit us in the netherlands, you'd be surprised ;-) don't believe everything your government propaganda tells you!

have a nice day

Meneer de Koekepeer

Re:public money as WELL?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get an idea of what a decent education costs in the UK by looking at how much they would charge a foreign student. Even then, the courses are probably cheaper than the US equivalent.

This brings to mind the real answer for those who are concerned about the quality of the American education system and its seemingly infinite appetite for more money. Simply strangle it and deny it any more money.

Worried about a lack of innovation? Hire in cheap foreign talent to do your innovating. In other words, the US can carry on as usual. Why pay expensive American professors when you can get the same results for half price from abroad (where those foreign suckers still subsidise education).

By the way, don't forget to tie any inventions up in intellectual property laws (otherwise, the people who paid for the education may get some benefit from it).

It's called precedent

[Wire Tap]

And it can do equal amounts of harm (ill-justice) or good (justice!) depending on how it is used, and, sometimes, the intention of the original lawmakers. Precedent is one of the strongest means to sway the law, and is quite respected in the legal community. You know all those great big rooms full of huge volumes of faceless books? Those are more than likely the compilations of huge numbers of cases, available to any who might want to look up a case and its verdict, sentence, etc, ad infinitum, for use as precedent.

What's happening here is very similar.

Re:It's called precedent

[killthiskid]

Slightly OT, but a question: why does precedence have so much power? Consistency? Other wise?

Just curious.

Don't get me started.

[Quixote]

This really got to me:
Bill Hoskins, who is currently in charge of protecting the intellectual property produced at U.C. Berkeley, thinks it must have been a mistake. "Whoever released the code for the Internet probably didn't understand what they were doing," he says.
No, Mr. Hoskins, they knew what they were doing, apparently you don't. If making money was all that mattered to you, you should've joined a corporation.

Re:Don't get me started.

[Rogerborg]

• Had his predecessors understood how huge the Internet would turn out to be, Hoskins figures, they would surely have licensed the protocols, sold the rights to a corporation and collected a royalty

What a curiously idiotic statement. All they had to do was to to use their 20-20 prescience to decide that this arbitrary piece of technology was going to be huge, and then they could should have kept it proprietary and commercial, because god knows that wouldn't have slowed the adoption of it, right?

This is either a misquote, or Mr Hoskins needs beaten around the head with the basics of capitalist society. You can't dictate to the market until there is a market, and you can't create demand for a new technology by cackling and saying "All your install base are belong to us". Even Microsoft couldn't do that until they'd killed all the effective competition.

Re:Don't get me started.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are the one not getting it.

A universitys job is not to kill corporations, after all thats where most of their students will be working when they get out.

Re:Don't get me started.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you want students to make it impossible for their graduated comrades to have working businessess and income?

Re:Don't get me started.

[Cire]

If making money was all that mattered to you, you should've joined a corporation.

But that's the point! Most universities are corporations these days. And most of the people in the administration not only treat it that way, but are under serious amounts of pressuer to make a school profitable.

Universities have huge amounts of people who sit in front of spread sheets all day trying to figure out how much money the university has, how much it can make this year and how much it projects to make next year - and none of these people have anything to do whatsoever with learning!

Cire

Re:Don't get me started.

[jarkko]

Bill Hoskins, who is currently in charge of protecting the intellectual property produced at U.C. Berkeley, thinks it must have been a mistake. "Whoever released the code for the Internet probably didn't understand what they were doing," he says.

Which is pretty interesting considering that there wouldn't be the internet without UCB and their fine TCP/IP stack (+sockets). At least not as we know it.

I've seen some pretty idiotic statements before but this is .sig-material! The whole statement just boggles the mind..

Re:Don't get me started.

[supersnail]

Berkley did not invent the internet, they did not even invent TCP/IP.

They (Bill Joy really) coded an implementation of the TCP/IP protocol which was already defined and implemented on several other systems.

They did add the standard sockets/inetd interface. And the TCP/IP stack as coded is the basis of nearly all current UNIX and all Windows implementations of TCP/IP.

However this happened largely because the code was free (as in beer), if Berkley had tried to charge for thier TCP/IP stack and patent thier sockets implmentation then SUN, Microsoft et all would probably have written thier own version rather than get into a contractual relationship for a fundamental part of thier systems.

This principal applies to almost any part of the internet as it now exits. Free and open software gets used because it is cheap, easy to improve and easy to standardise. Proprietry software is avoided because of expense, vendor lock in, difficulties in standards setting etc.etc.

As Mike Berniers Lee said "If we had charged for Mosaic nobody would have used it".

Re:Don't get me started.

[Anonymous Coward]

A universitys job is not to kill corporations, after all thats where most of their students will be working when they get out.

Why is idiocy like this always posted by an AC?

-Another AC

Re:Don't get me started.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Tim, not Mike. He had nothing to do with Mosaic.

Re:Don't get me started.

[kin_korn_karn]

Universities are businesses that have managed to artificially create a demand for their product. The vast majority of jobs don't require a college degree or any kind of advanced training beyond what you get 'on-the-job' to do. Other than the medical field, or something like law where you NEED to learn from mistakes of the whole of the profession, I can tell you why you don't need a degree for almost any job.

Re:Don't get me started.

[koekepeer]

Within the context of this specific example, I agree completely with you.

However, the creation of markets is happening all the time. This process is called marketing ;-).

Again, that does not apply to the "Hoskins" example, obviously.

Meneer de Koekepeer

Re:Don't get me started.

[jmauro]

Engineering and Computer Science fall into this feild as well. Failing to learn the mistakes of others means that people die. We've learned how to build good bridges. It's not something I'd like an engineer to learn as he or she goes.

Re:Don't get me started.

[kin_korn_karn]

I'll grant you that for civil engineering. It's one of the oldest disciplines (back to the ancients) and there's so much knowledge that it would be criminal not to use it. Still, one can go buy the textbooks and learn it themselves if they're sufficiently motivated. Strictly speaking, a university is NOT needed to learn this, but it's so often arcane that it might as well be.

In contrast, Computer Science is one of the newest technology disciplines. There's not much from the short history of programming that applies to today's software engineering practices, other than basic notions of economy and flow control. Any bright person with the right kind of mind (process-oriented) can learn that in a few days of working on something. And they always have to, because, a lot of the things that are used in the real world that the old folks in universities don't even know it.

It doesn't take 4-5 years of university CS to be a programmer (or to be a software engineer if you're one of those that think they're something different). It just takes the drive and the right type of mind. Fortunately I have both of those, because I hate school with a passion. There are some things that make me regret not finishing my degree, but not many.

Re:Don't get me started.

[jedidiah]

In both of your examples, you are FAR MORE likely to learn these lessons ON THE JOB from your more experienced colleagues than in the University. As much as universities like to claim the importance of esoteric theoretical knowledge, it is ultimately practice and experience that count in most jobs.

This even includes Law and also includes Medicine to some degree.

Just contemplate whether or not you want someone that just passed the bar defending you against felony indictment, or whether or not you would be comfortable with the equivalent medical situation.

Re:Don't get me started.

[goon]

As Mike Berniers Lee said "If we had charged for Mosaic nobody would have used it".

who is Mike? A brother of Tim?

Re:Don't get me started.

[nateb]

Tim.

Here's a question.

[withak53]

Can the students also sell the code?
I'm sure they couldn't sell the product as is.
But can they give it a touch up and sell it themselves if they wrote the entire thing?

Re:Here's a question.

[nosferatu1001]

Nope, cos any work you do on the unis systems is owned by them, not you. Check your computer systems agreement with the uni!

Re:Here's a question.

[withak53]

You'd think so but my alma mater doesn't specify that. The only thing they specify is that I can't use their computers for financial gain. But my senior project was written on my computer. I never signed it over or anything.

Sad

[gandalf_grey]

I just gotta say that I think it's so sad that the very foundation of the internet (open source, free sharing, open borders, world access to information) is slowly being choked by commercialism and governments.

Surfers of the world unite! Be free! Information is not evil, and coding is not a crime!

OK. OK. In seriousness, how can we promote the free sharing of code within academic institutions so hard pressed for cash?

Soon to be called...

[inerte]

Univer$ities? Heh, I was getting tired of poking mostly Gates :-)

Tax Status

[gorillasoft]

If they want to sell all of their inventions / code, then they should lose their tax-exempt not-for-profit status.

Re:Tax Status

[CryptoRAT]

You could further that argument and say that since taxpayers are currently paying for the research that they should be charged for the result...double charging.

The unfortunate thing is that universities must seek new means of funding themselves as the alumni find it harder to achieve financial success and the government pays less.

This could backfire

[testy]

If colleges are doing this as a method of enhancing revenue, I have to wonder if they're prepared for the loss of potential alumni contributions that actions like this could cause. There is also the possibility that schools could be found (by a court, for instance, or tax authorities) to be functioning as for-profit entities; that opens up a can of worms that no administrator wants to deal with.

Finally, I'm curious as to how many talented students will be motivated to continue cranking out code for a lab that may take it from them and sell it with no compensation. Comp Sci departments are already struggling with high dropout rates as skilled students leave to make money in full-time positions. I don't see these kinds of actions as ways to encourage good students to stay in school and finish off their degrees.

Re:This could backfire

[Black Parrot]

> If colleges are doing this as a method of enhancing revenue, I have to wonder if they're prepared for the loss of potential alumni contributions that actions like this could cause.

Where the heck did you go to school? On my planet the only thing that affects alumni contributions is how well the ball team did this year.

And of course, the 98% of the donations go straight back to the athletics program anyway.

Most public universities in the USA are just fronts for hiding the fact that the state legislature wants to own a professional football team. Though I advocate higher education, I'll never donate a dime to any school I ever attended.

Re:This could backfire

[pinkj]

Hmmm...Go into debt to be taught how to code better and more innovative software so the university can sell it at a profit while you get little out of their benefit other than graduating and probably finding employment in the ever growing and creatively stunted field of white collar paper pusher? Sounds reasonable to me.

Re:This could backfire

[testy]

Where the heck did you go to school?

A school that has no football team. A school whose current computer science building was built thanks to the contribution of a single, wealthy alumnus. A school that recently received a few hundred PCs from a graduate who now owns a computer company. I could go on, but won't.

On my planet the only thing that affects alumni contributions is how well the ball team did this year.

UC Berkeley (to use an example from the article) doesn't exactly have a powerful football presence. Nor does MIT, or many of the other Comp Sci powerhouses in the U.S. Yet somehow, their alumni give them money without purchasing season tickets or skyboxes.

Re:This could backfire

[brad3378]

You bring up a good point.
Some colleges want to do this as an attempt to raise revenue, but how many are willing to take responsibility for their code?

For instance:
What if a school sells some faulty anti-lock braking system code to an auto maker? (okay, it's a stretch)

What if your college released code containing viruses?

Who would be responsible? Should consumers be able to sue the college that released the bad code? If its a state college, are taxpayers liable? If the code is released with no warranties, does the customer assume all responsibility (Like people who use Linux)? How could a tax-paying corporation compete against a tax sheltered college?

Re:This could backfire

[tburkhol]

There is also the possibility that schools could be found (by a court, for instance, or tax authorities) to be functioning as for-profit entities

The only way that could happen is if they started paying a dividend, and no-one who knows anything about Universities believes there will ever be a penny left unspent at the end of a fiscal year.

Re:This could backfire

[Laterite]

>>What if your college released code containing viruses?

Hehe, funny you should bring this up. Does anyone remember the "Wazzu" Word macrovirus from 5-6 years ago? It would randomly place the word "wazzu" among your document text.

Some wag created it to mess with University of Washington students, but of course it came back to bite us in the...well...wazzu.

Who is "us", you ask? Why, Washington State University, of course...WSU...Wazzu...

-Mark

It's the American way!

[Marx_Mrvelous]

(sarcasm)
Of course they'll sell their code! It's the only way to be an American! *Giving* code away, well, that's just un-American.

And we don't want to be un-American, do we?
(/sarcasm)

Re:It's the American way!

[NightWhistler]

Actually it may be new in America, but in the Netherlands it's nothing new...
The last software engineering project I did, we had to sign away all rights to the software we were going to create before we were allowed tot participate.

When we had plans to further develope the project outside of classes, we had to negotiate for the rights of our software... So you see, it's really nothing new...

Let's just kill the goose, shall we?

[Svartalf]

The Internet wouldn't be what it is today without it having been released the way it was. If they tried to profit from the protocols, etc. the thing wouldn't have been much different than the other networks of the day- they'd have not seen the money they think they would have. Basically, that UC Berkley guy's a clueless fool for thinking that it was a mistake and that Berkley would have seen much of anything from it.

Re:Let's just kill the goose, shall we?

[dunstan]

Exactly. Look at some of the technologies which were developed by Sun:

NFS - released for free. Widespread.
NeWS - brilliant Windowing system, far better than X. Kept Proprietary. Died.
Java - released for free (effectively). Widespread

To roughly quote Stallman: making people pay money each time they use a copy of your software is the biggest disincentive you can create for its widespread adoption

Dunstan

Re:Let's just kill the goose, shall we?

[ShadyG]

To roughly quote Stallman: making people pay money each time they use a copy of your software is the biggest disincentive you can create for its widespread adoption

Interesting to hear RMS say such a thing. He seems uninterested in widespread adoption. In fact, he seems uninterested in anything other than encouraging free software. Isn't that the whole reason behind insisting on GPL code rather than a BSD-style license? If it's not widely used, then it's only because the people who otherwise would have used it would not have kept it free.

-- ShadyG

It's normal

[mbennis]

That's OK for me as long as i don't have to pay my studies....

And why shouldn't they?

[Bowie J. Poag]

It may not be in keeping with what we specifically would like to see done with the code, but...as far as i'm concerned, they're not doing anything wrong, or bad, or illegal by trying to make money off code that was developed on their boxen, and on their time.

If you cant stand the heat, get out of the kitchen, if you don't want your cow gettin' out, keep your barn door shut, and if you don't want Corporate Entity X making money off your work, don't develop it on their gear on their time. Simple as that.

Re:And why shouldn't they?

[arkanes]

Because it's not their box, or their time. This is a university, not Corporate Entity X. The students already paid to be there. They aren't making "works for hire". Regardless of the legalities of it, and I suspect there may be some issues - while patents are almost always required to be signed over to the school, I'm fairly sure that the school doesn't get copyright on works developed by students, else alot of Lit majors would be up the creek - it's morally bankrupt.

Re:And why shouldn't they?

[mcfiddish]

... they're not doing anything wrong, or bad, or illegal by trying to make money off code that was developed on their boxen, and on their time.

In many cases, those boxen and the labor by the researchers/students were paid for by federal grants. In other words, US citizens have already paid for the work. Why shouldn't we benefit from it instead of paying for it a second time to use under some restrictive license, if at all?

Re:And why shouldn't they?

[Anonymous Coward]

What does it really matter if it was developed on university computers? If you were to discover some new theory and/or write (in part) the next best OS on someone else's notepad, should they have ownership? A computer is just a tool. If the university had provided resources that were necessary for it, then it would be another story, but to use a university computer in most cases is a convenience, not a necessity.

What if you brought your own computer, but used there network to find resources that were necessary of helpful for your project? Does that mean that the university should control that work as well? Those resources are widely available, so it would be no problem getting access to it from another site. Does it make sense to treat it any differently if the university provided you with a convenience that you pay for? It seems that eventually it is going to get to the point that if you breathe air that is conditioned by university resources (a.k.a. air conditioning, or heating for that matter), thus are benefitting from university property, you lose control of your own project. If it isn't a convenience, it is necessity. And if it isn't a necessity, it can be done without. And if it can be done without, it isn't important. And if it isn't important, what is the issue besides universities trying to screw people out of there own works? Doesn't this make sense? Am I confused? Tell me please, inquiring minds want to know.

Re:And why shouldn't they?

[Bowie J. Poag]

Show me a University that doesn't have a "Property Of University Of (n)" sticker on its machines. Ours here at U of A are even metallic.

Its their box, not yours.

Next youll be telling me the Xerox machines at Kinkos are yours too, because you go there and use them, and pay money to do so.

Re:And why shouldn't they?

[Bowie J. Poag]

Simple. Same reason why you cant take the pen with you when you deposit a check at a bank teller. Its not your damn pen. That pen was bought with your money, more specifically, the interest earned on your money.

Community machines are not community property.

Re:And why shouldn't they?

[YoungHack]

> Show me a University that doesn't have a "Property Of University Of (n)" sticker on its machines. Ours here at U of A are even metallic.

>Its their box, not yours.

>Next youll be telling me the Xerox machines at Kinkos are yours too, because you go there and use them, and pay money to do so.

No, but Xerox and Kinkos don't decide that they own the property you run through a copy machine just because they own the machine. If you pay (tuition) to use the machines at a University, there is no reason to think that the Univ suddenly owns the work you created with them either.

Re:And why shouldn't they?

[Cro Magnon]

Yes, but you don't have to pay again to use the !@#$ pen!

It's more complicated.

[westfirst]

The article is good, but it misses some points. First, Los Alamos is a far cry from a university. They develop atomic weapons there and those are classified.

Second, many government research contracts force the professors to share their code. The Mach kernel, for instance, began life at Carnagie Mellon thanks to government money. Rick Rashid, one of the project's leaders, released it with a very open BSD-like license. He says that work developed with the public money deserves to be as free as possible. This has been going on for some time.

I suppose it could be getting worse, but I don't know if it is as bad as the author suggests.

Re:It's more complicated.

[msouth]

Disclaimer: I did not read the article.

Second, many government research contracts force the professors to share their code.

Can you back this up? I am not sure why it was in the same paragraph with:

The Mach kernel, for instance, began life at Carnagie Mellon thanks to government money. Rick Rashid, one of the project's leaders, released it with a very open BSD-like license. He says that work developed with the public money deserves to be as free as possible. This has been going on for some time.

In this case, you have a person who realized that decided he should license things this way, and did so. I think that, when it happens, this is why.

I have worked on various projects that were funded by your tax money, and they are now being sold as proprietary software. In that case, the person who got the grant did not decide to put it out as open source. I also do not have numbers to back myself up, but I am guessing that the vast majority of government contracts do not require the source code to be released under a BSD type license.

I wrote something about this on the siliconvalley.com debate with Mundie et al:

http://www.fulcrum.org/features/public_domain.html

Re:It's more complicated.

[crindt]

The article is good, but it misses some points. First, Los Alamos is a far cry from a university. They develop atomic weapons there and those are classified.

Yes, but they also received upwards of $25 million over the past 6 years to develop an urban transportation model which they have since licensed to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Granting the exclusive right to develop and market the product to a single commercial entity seems dubious given that their TRANSIMS system is intended to replace existing transportation forecasting methods (since existing transportation air quality modeling practice has successfully been challenged in court).

Re:It's more complicated.

[tburkhol]

From the NSF's Grant Policy Manual:

To preserve incentives for private dissemination and development, NSF normally will not restrict or take any part of income earned from copyrightable material except as necessary to comply with the requirements of any applicable government-wide policy or international agreement.

The disposition of rights to inventions made by small business firms and non-profit organizations, including universities and other institutions of higher education, during NSF-assisted research is
governed by Chapter 18 of title 35 of the USC, commonly called the Bayh-Dole Act.

Essentially, since 1980, NSF (et al.) has stopped asking that federal research be released to the public, instead giving the grantee "first refusal."

The only problem I see with this...

[night_flyer]

is that a lot of code is derived from students, the students are paying to go to school. The university should have NO rights to the code that was developed by their students, only that derived from the faculty...

Re:The only problem I see with this...

[Onnimikki]

The students are using university property to develop the code. They only pay a fraction of the cost via their tuition; the rest is obtained from other funding sources including public and corporate ones.

Since there are so many interests funding university resources, the answer as to who owns the intellectual property developed with these resources becomes a whole lot more difficult to figure out.

I've dealt with the University of Alberta's Industry Liason Office. Here is a summary of their performance since 1994. In the short term it is often diffcult to deal with them, but the overhead fees they charge are important: "The indirect costs -- or overhead -- of research include utilities (electricity, water, natural gas, and so on) physical plant (building maintenance, repairs), library support, financial and other administrative costs" (source). Check out that page since it'll even give you a percentage breakdown of where the overhead fees are allocated. For instance, 11% of the fees go to the university's libraries. That means that other students will get access to more books.

The ILO departments also provide important services to researchers such as patent background checks and market analysis. They're not just blood-suckers waiting to bounce on student- or professor-generated ideas.

Re:The only problem I see with this...

[neonstz]

The students are using university property to develop the code. They only pay a fraction of the cost via their tuition; the rest is obtained from other funding sources including public and corporate ones.

You have to remember that the student actually spends some hours writing the code too. A 100 hour project at $20 is actually (using the hyper-advanced salary calculation algorithm) $2000.

Anyway, I went to college for 3 years in Norway, and in the last semester we had a large project. Usually the groups got tasks from the local industry, and one of the agreements the company had to sign was that all documents (including code) should be freely available (except classified military stuff). The company my group had a project for (and which is now my employer) still uses some of the software we wrote back then (we wrote a tool for internal use only though).

I think it's important that stuff developed at schools and universities are free. This enables other students from all over the world to check out previous work. However, if the school/university cooperates with local industry, that company allowed to use that code to whatever they want (but the code should still be free).

Re:The only problem I see with this...

[ilsa]

At first blush that sounds like a reasonable litmus test. However, most professors at the type of institution where this would be an issue have student assistants of some variety. Professor Q says to Student Assistant B "I need you to do this task for a project I am working on." Student assistants, btw, are paid a pittance of a stipend for such services, making them unquestionably employees for purposes of this discussion. Even if the student assistant comes up with a novel, patentable solution for the problem, it is effectively a work-for-hire.

Socrates should have licensed his works

[Anonymous Coward]

The article starts off with the UC system as an example. I can't think of a more pretentious bloated system to use as an example. But it is the leading higher education system in the country so even though its not a surprising example it is valid.

In the UC system you are lucky if you actaully see a professor your first two years. And the UC system has been busy turning itself into a corporation for decades. Learning smerning. Who needs learning when there is money to be made?
And they make a ton of it. But isn't the corruption of education from sport an equally puzzling issue? I mean who doesn't realize college is now a joke? I would say UC has a great reputation because it has the top pick of the largest number of US students many immigrants. That has the more to do with UC glory than anything.

And keeping your intellectual property secret has as much to do with marketing your school (you don't really want the public to be able too see how rather mediocre the professors are) as it does with profit. They go hand in hand.

Two quickies

[halftrack]

1) Had his predecessors understood how huge the Internet would turn out to be, Hoskins figures, they would surely have licensed the protocols, sold the rights to a corporation and collected a royalty for the U.C. Regents on Internet usage years into the future. Does this person know how the IT market works, how people think about abstracktities like the Internet? "Isn't free, will only consider it."

2) Software for modeling global climate change, the behavior of viral epidemics and traffic patterns are among the programs researchers can't get released, he says. This kind of software not having the greatest market (how often do you wish to simulate a viral epidemic) makes it extremly expencive makeing it more probable that those who do need it makes it themself - also releasing it commercial. That makes to great pieces of code that could have been the best ever had they learnt from any of each-others mistakes (even great code has got bugs and stupidities.)

strong analogy to copyright

[Anonymous Coward]

The right to license code written by students has a strong analogy to copyright of documents, such as theses, written by students. I believe most schools share control of copyright with the students and have done so for generations. At my school, MIT, the rules vary from department to department. In my department, I get a royalty free license to copy my PhD thesis. How 'bout other folks & other schools?

Re:strong analogy to copyright

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, MIT, and your still an idiot.

You fail to see the difference between a published work that can still be accessed by the public yet protected and code that is copyrighted, not public domain, and illigal to reverse engineer.

Do you get it? Probabaly not. So let me put it this way. Anyone can get access to my university library and rifle through all sorts of research. So its still in the public domain and open to debate. We can have a discussion about whether Chomsky was smoking crack or not when he thought up generative grammar based on his works.

But if universities start to restrict who can see the research (for fee is considered a restriction in my book) then we are in a situation where only the wealthy get to know. And I imagine that if schools start to license software they will not release the source. And this is very bad. As a programmer I have been shocked by the poor level of real world skill I have seen in profs I have worked with. I have seen more than one prof sent home. Unfortunatly, most of the public believes profs are Gods. And this is marketable as long as you keep reality a secret. And that is what scares me. The profit drive conflicts with the needs of science for open debate.

Did you get that? You might want to read it again.

Re:strong analogy to copyright

[romi]

Chill duke, just cuz you didn't get in doesn't mean you gotta go ape on his ass...

No surprise, really...

[Jones E. Versichoran]

I suppose the situation could be rather different in the U.S., but in Canada this trend is also quite apparent for the very alarming reason that Universities can't get smack by way of funding anymore. I'm not sure what we expect of public institutions but to go private, if they start getting choked of public funds.

And thats bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole industry has serious problems and those problems origin in that the value in what people do are to low. If there is man-hours spent on doing something the income from it should be according to it.

Schools job is not to kill companies, in that case, where are the student going to work then they get out?

For example, dot-coms are going under. The internet as a whole is mainly a failure even if there are some exceptions. Even if one company tries to handle their business in a professional way there are always others ruin the industry by not charging enough for their products (not charging enough=company will die when VC money is spent).

The massive amount of VC money that got into IT-related industry is a big blame factor. Market share was everything, make a long-term working business was something to think about later down the line. So, how did you get market-share? By giving everything away for free, but as any sane person understands (except RMS) this doesn't pay the salaries and other expenses when the VC money runs out.

By charging more the value goes up and thats what needed both in dot-coms and software development companies.

Re:And thats bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

"but as any sane person understands (except RMS) this "

Noone should mistake RMS for a sane person.

Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the kids (and adults) who PAY to go to SCHOOL (directly or via taxes they'll pay later) are there as students, not employees. A school has no right to make money off students activities beyond the tuition/taxes those students pay.

If they university wants to make money, it should form a corporation seperate from the school. Students are not (officially) slaves. They are the paying customrs of the university, not the other way around.

Exploit students as cheap labor and get away it!

[gpinzone]

Most kids struggle just to afford college. Tuition rates at most private and even many public universities are astronomical. Many students need to get a part-time job just to make ends meet. If these institutions of higher learning want to make a profit off their students' coding efforts, that's fine with me. Just as long as they send those students their royalty checks when the software those students developed starts making money. Hey, this will be a great way to beef up the PHD. program! Get paid while you learn! Granted, you won't make as much as you could in the "real world," but it's a safe alternative considering the dot-com bust. And hey, if the software doesn't sell, the student's don't get paid. Seems fair, right?

I've got the funny feeling universities aren't going to be so "forward thinking."

NOt at all unprecedented

[secret_squirrel_99]

Universities have licensed code/protocols/ideas for years. A well known example to slashdotters would be the money paid to Berkley for the work done there by Diffie-Hellman, and the licensing fees paid by RSA to gain the rights to the work done there by Ron Rivest. In addition, universities routinely patent the results of other (non CS) research, and then sell/license the results to subsidize further reseacrh

moving forward.

[xdangavinx]

i can't recall who said it, but i do know of a quote i've read that was something along the lines of "societies that advance, are the openly that share knowledge with others".

often colleges and universities are regarded as places where information is openly shared, and if they begin to stop sharing their findings with those outside of the university, does anyone feel that there may be many situations where researchers will on more often than they should be doing research on problems that have already been solved?

Re:moving forward.

[Anonymous Coward]

"societies that advance, are the openly that share knowledge with others"

Yeah! That why China, North Korea and Cuba is so rich and USA is so poor!

Is it really fair?

[ScroP]

Maybe some answers have been offered to this type of question, but I wonder if this is fair to everyone to do this. The students who develop the software will eventually move on and move away from the univiersity. Who is ulitmately responsible for the continued maintence and support of the 'products' the university is selling?

Is it fair for compaines to rely on a product that changes in hands in a sense every semester?

And does this mean that the education you recieve will now depend on the agenda of the univiersity? The first students might have some freedom to do research where they are interested, but eventually students would be forced to choose from a handfiul of products to do 'research' in, which really would be maintence. Doesn't this hinder things in general for everyone? Not just the students, but the society at learge who'd be affect by fewer advances as a result of less research?

What would the world of cs education be if windows was a product mainted by a univiserity and not microsoft? Would everyone would be trained with windows specific skills and not general skills?

Does the student get any more for this? It'd be nice to get paid for something :)

Berkeley sued Cisco, yes?

[gelfling]

There was nothing public domain about it. Berkeley sued Cisco to get unspecified monetary awards over some basic Cisco technology. I don't believe Berkeley ever had any intention of releasing that technology to the world. They wanted to profit from it.

It's "its".

[Anonymous Coward]

The possessive form of "it" is "its". Grammar counts.

It's not the selling that bothers me...

[skribble]

it the fact that what the Universities and Federal agencies are selling is funded with my tax money. Essentially all U.S. Tax payers have already payed for this software, and nobody want to turn around and pay M$ or some othe company for it again.

Now if the University want to give up all public funds... It can do whatever it wants, but as long as they're using my tax money, I want my software :)

Re:It's not the selling that bothers me...

[Anonymous Coward]

"have already payed for this software"

Repeat after me ...
PAID
PAID
PAID
PAID
PAID

Public funding of Free Software

[martinde]

My personal opinion is the that government should be Free Software's biggest friend. I feel that public monies should be used to benefit as many people as possible (not frivously though), and that by supporting Free Software development, more people will benefit than buy investing in proprietary applications.

So, how does one get the government to buy into this plan? Perhaps it's time that the Free Software Foundation or Software in the Public Interest hires a professional lobbyist to make some inroads into the US and other governments. Free Software is reaching the point where it is a highly viable alternative to propietary solutions. With the proper lobbying and data showing positive cost/benefit analysis, perhaps we can get more momentum behind Free Software.

Re:Public funding of Free Software

[GKChesterton]

More government handouts are not a solution.

Government should not be in the business of taking people's money as taxes and using them to promote one thing over another. I'm sick and tired of government using our tax money for social engineering.

If we want free (as in freedom) software to succeed we should accomplish it by earning that success...by writing good software that people (not just us geeks) want to use because its better quality, less expensive, more flexible, and unencumbered by the licensing issues, and the privacy-invasive marketing and advertising schemes.

Trying to accomplish it by government dictate with taxpayer's dollars is doomed to failure and is just socialist social engineering.

GKC

Re:Public funding of Free Software

[kin_korn_karn]

Trying to accomplish it by government dictate with taxpayer's dollars is doomed to failure and is just socialist social engineering.

You need to stop watching Bill O'Reilly. What's so bad about the government HELPING PEOPLE?? Would you prefer, say, Microsoft driving the free software development? Do you actually think that a soulless corporation is preferable to the government? At least the gov't has a reason to want the country to succeed - they want to exist! Corps don't care about nations and cultures, in fact they're mostly "obstacles to business".

Also, you've forgotten the one rule of American society: people are idiots. Therefore, you have to work with the lowest common denominator. Motivate through rhetoric and only let a few think, because they're the only ones who can.

Libertarians are so fucking naive.

Re:Public funding of Free Software

[martinde]

> More government handouts are not a solution.

I agree 100%. Hopefully you're not suggesting that governments currently don't spend money on software? My point is that the money that is spent should go to benefit the public, not shareholders of an individual company. (If there is an appropriate solution that fits the problem that is being solved with the software in question. I think the government should be pragmatic too.)

> Trying to accomplish it by government dictate with taxpayer's dollars is doomed to failure and is just socialist social engineering.

Again, I said that there needs to be cost/benefit analysis showing that Free Software makes economic sense, I didn't say anything about mandating laws to do anything. But without some voice in the government, noone will ever see the cost benefit analysis. AFAIK, and I'm not an expert so tell me if I'm wrong, if you want a voice in government in this day and age, you need a lobby. I don't pretend to know how to do this, but I'm sure there are lobbies for hire, which was my original point. Hiring a lobbyist will cost money, but there are a few organizations out there that could possibly bankroll such an effort.

Re:Public funding of Free Software

[GKChesterton]

You need to stop watching Bill O'Reilly.

I don't watch Bill O'Reilly. The government set-up cable monopoly where I live unfortunately doesn't show Fox News.

What's so bad about the government HELPING PEOPLE??

Our government has source code, its called the constitution. In it there's nothing about the government taking people's tax money and doing things that ordinary people should be doing for themselves, including developing software.

Do you actually think that a soulless corporation is preferable to the government?

Nowhere did I mention that a corporation was the only alternative to government. I was addressing the open source community...people... If we, as software developers, want open source / free software to succeed, we should do it by earning that success...not depending upon government...or corporations. If corporations want to help out, fine...but don't depend on them. Government is an entirely different matter though. They should not be "helping out" in areas where they have no authority. Government does need to buy software, however, but they also have a financial and ethical responsibility to taxpayers and citizens. So they should buy the best and most cost-effective software for the job. I'm not naive enough to believe that currently that would always be open source or free software. But in many cases it would. Fine. They can buy software. But to promote one type of software development over another...no, that's not within our government's authority.

Libertarians are so ... naive.

I agree with you, in general. They are naive on many things. I'm not a libertarian. But since you've felt free to label me, whom you don't know at all...I'll feel free to take some liberties myself...

Also, you've forgotten the one rule of American society: people are idiots.

Typical liberal. The people are idiots...only we elite know what's best for them, and we'll make the government force-feed it to them whether they want it or not. And lets attack anybody who disagrees with us by calling them names and using foul language.

Thank you, no.

I like and use a lot of open source and free software. I think monopolies such as Microsoft's are a danger to competition and capitalism in general. I think open and free software can produce some fine software and can compete favorably against proprietary. But in the interest of true freedom, I am not for forcibly abolishing proprietary software nor am I for incorrectly using the force of government to dictate that one form of software development is "good" and shall be promoted over another that is deemed "evil". That's not government's job.

GKC

Re:Public funding of Free Software

[GKChesterton]

You're right. I wasn't sufficiently clear. I'm not saying that government shouldn't buy software. I was saying that government shouldn't be in the business of promoting one business model over another, which wasn't necessarily your original point...but I know too many out there who would make it their point. :)

When government buys software they should buy the software that does the job they need to have done in the most cost-effective way possible. At this point in time, that's not always going to be open source or free software.

As for lobbyists...at best they are necessary evil. I'd prefer to stay away from them. :)

GKC

Re:Public funding of Free Software

[kin_korn_karn]

society: people are idiots.

Typical liberal. The people are idiots...only we elite know what's best for them, and we'll make the government force-feed it to them whether they want it or not. And lets attack anybody who disagrees with us by calling them names and using foul language.

I apologize for hurting your soft ears. Your daddy Reagan was more elitist than a million liberals, though. Nothing's more elitist than handing the keys of civilization (i.e. money) to people who already own the bodies and minds of the masses (i.e. the super-rich).

Free Money Book

[iCharles]

Wow! All of the sudden, I'm thinking of the commerical with the guy in the suit with the question marks all over it. "Get your free money from the goverment--get a grant to write a book, start a buisiness, or sit on your..."

Income Redistribution: It's the American Way!

And that's why....

[jamirocake]

"...universities and federal research labs have become more interested in making money than serving the public interest."
And that's is why technology hasn't really advanced in the last decade we only have been "bulding over" techniques and concepts that were developed and conceptually created decades ago: The microchip is probably more than 30 years old already and i don't see any new technolgies comming on the ner future.

Inaccurate reporing by Salon.

[ehack]

The following is tendacious:In 1992, Berkeley released its version of Unix and TCP/IP to the public as open-source code, and the combination quickly became the backbone of a network so vast that people started to call it, simply, "the Internet."
This is almost as good as the New York Times lead Tim Berners Lee, a physicist at MIT who invented the world-wide web

You can't have your cake and eat it , too...

[GKChesterton]

These universities and labs should either be 100% private or 100% public. If they're public, if they accept public money, then the results should be available for all citizens to see and use. Alternatively, if they want to auction or license something off to the higher bidder, then the "revenue stream" should go back to the public taxpayers, not to the university or lab. We're the real "owners" of the product because we paid for it.

On the other hand, if they want to become private organizations and get off the public dole, then they can do what they want.

GKC

They better not...

[spatrick_123]

If those bastards sell my "Hello, World" code from Intro to CompSci I'll sue them for everything they're worth!

Here's how they should break it out.

[OS24Ever]

There should be two methods of determining whether or not the university can make money off their product.

Rule #1) If Students worked on the project, and were not compensated by things such as free tuition, comparable salary with public sector, or royalties of the distributed project they can not sell it.

Rule #2) If the project was funded by the US Government, State or Local Government, it can not be sold.

Rule #3) If the finances come from money that is considered 'tax deductable' by the person(s) giving the money, they can no sell it.

Rule #5) All proceeds from said sale of software is taxable as a standard corporation.

Until the rest of the Americans wake up and realize what is going on with education, it will continue to go down the tubes. It's not that Universites have suddenly gotten greedy, it's that they've suddenly gotten desperate. College Tuition is getting to be out of reach for more and more people. Or, more and more people are starting life with $40,000, $50,000, even $60,000 worth of debt for basic state universities.

It's a sad commentary on America. Guess which departments of Universites are the best funded?

Sports.

It's pathetic.

Re:Here's how they should break it out.

[jdavidb]

$40000 for a state university? In Texas, it was around $1500/semester when I started, and around $2000/semester when I finished. We're a little below national average but not that much. I can see that much or more for private schools.

Re:Here's how they should break it out.

[Anonymous Coward]

The market is trying to compensate for what has happened to college education.

Didn't a college degree used to mean something? I mean, it was rare. You had been educated. You can now join the workforce with a little training and head right into management.

Now everyone and their brother has a degree. I've heard of plans to get every American into college.

Now, maybe a degree is worth something. But I've been out of college since last May and I haven't found squat. Temp jobs for 7$ hr that would bore a retard is my only income.

So, to decrease the amount of people who graduate, they allow silly rules and make college as pointless as possible. Increasing the price also turns people away.

What the heck is forcing the universities costs up so much? They don't produce ANYTHING. They don't have massive insurance costs. The buildings have been built.

Nothing. They're just making it up as they go along.

Re:Here's how they should break it out.

[romi]

The problem with that suggestion is that the University probably has a pile of money from different sources that was all donated to do "research", and they may allocate that money as they please between the different projects in their field... So it may be very easy for them to claim that a certain now-profitable project that they have sold was funded by private money, ex post facto.

Re:Here's how they should break it out.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's rent and crap like that..students (especially those rotting in labs 24/7) don't always work full time so costs like that tend to pile up and get rolled into student loans.

Re:Here's how they should break it out.

[blakestah]

There should be two methods of determining whether or not the university can make money off their product.

So now you are going to re-define the rules ? Well, let me take a stab at presenting the likely reply from the Intellectual Property Office.


Rule #1) If Students worked on the project, and were not compensated by things such as free tuition, comparable salary with public sector, or royalties of the distributed project they can not sell it.

Legally, exclusive copyright licensing from code written by students for class projects belongs to the school. This copyright licensing will help to maintain the very education that the student was receiving, and future students will receive better education at less cost because of this licensing.


Rule #2) If the project was funded by the US Government, State or Local Government, it can not be sold.

Money alone does not buy you intellectual property. If you fund a research project, that money assures that the project gets done, nothing else. If you want to fund a project and maintain the intellectual property, you might think about maintaining in infrastructure that can support researchers careers, instead of just donating a few hundred thousand dollars.


Rule #3) If the finances come from money that is considered 'tax deductable' by the person(s) giving the money, they can no sell it.


Again, this is a gross misunderstanding of what you get for your buck. At a corporation, you pay for the project, you pay for the researcher's overhead, you ensure he has a retirement plan, you give him benefits, you give him resources to ensure he can do the work, and part of his job description is creating intellectual property for the corporation.

At a university, the researcher gets grants from a variety of sources. The University provides job stability, the University provides overhead, the University provides benefits for the researcher, and the University has exclusive licensing to all intellectual property (although the holder maintains some rights for royalties). But it is not part of the job description that faculty create intellectual property. Promotions do not consider it. It is just a bonus. And it is the decision of the University as to what happens to it. The University is still much more responsible for the actions of its faculty than the grant sources.

It's not that Universites have suddenly gotten greedy, it's that they've suddenly gotten desperate.

Would you deny that such IP laws have had benefits ? For example. the Cohen-Boyer patent between UCSF and Stanford created Genentech, and has funnelled a BILLION dollars back to those universities, which are now boosting research. Cohen and Boyer did not have to make this patent to keep their jobs, but the careers of hundreds of investigators that followed them are much easier as a result, and more basic science research will get done.

On the other side, if Berkeley has licensed BSD originally, there would probably be no FreeBSD today, and much of our Internet software would perform much worse. Somehow there is a time to sell licensing rights, and a time to give them away, and a morass of ethical issues in between.

Re:Here's how they should break it out.

[vrt3]

Rule #1)
Rule #2)
Rule #3)
Rule #5)

Looks like America's education has gone down the tubes a long end already: people can't count anymore nowadays. Where did Rule #4 go??

Re:Here's how they should break it out.

[Anonymous Coward]

let's see. At my university (public) tuition is $2500 a semester for in-state tuition, plus various fees like a technology fee, student health fee, departmental fees, etc. which bring the cost up to about $3000,

Add to that rent of $350 a month, plus utilities, food, etc. Once all is said and done, I am spending about $12,000 a year on my education, including the cost of living near campus. For a four year undergrad degree that is about $50,000

Re:Here's how they should break it out.

[falzer]

Where did Rule #4 go??

Rule #4) There is no rule #4.

Re:Here's how they should break it out.

[JordanH]

• Money alone does not buy you intellectual property. If you fund a research project, that money assures that the project gets done, nothing else. If you want to fund a project and maintain the intellectual property, you might think about maintaining in infrastructure that can support researchers careers, instead of just donating a few hundred thousand dollars.

Money alone buys IP all the time. In fact, as you point out, the Universities own the IP because they support (pay money to and spend money to facilitate) the researchers.

I would think that tenure, both at Universities and Research Institutions is exactly this "maintaining in (sic) infrastructure that can support researchers' careers".

Typically, researchers in the public sector have committed to various high-minded ideals about supporting civilization through their efforts. If they wanted to get rich from their scientific research, or they wanted to contribute to the ongoing funding of a Corporation, there are many private avenues for this.

• Would you deny that such IP laws have had benefits ? For example. the Cohen-Boyer patent between UCSF and Stanford created Genentech, and has funnelled a BILLION dollars back to those universities, which are now boosting research. Cohen and Boyer did not have to make this patent to keep their jobs, but the careers of hundreds of investigators that followed them are much easier as a result, and more basic science research will get done.
  

  
  On the other side, if Berkeley has licensed BSD originally, there would probably be no FreeBSD today, and much of our Internet software would perform much worse. Somehow there is a time to sell licensing rights, and a time to give them away, and a morass of ethical issues in between.
  

Maybe the lesson to be learned from licensing BSD and TCP/IP software is that it's always better to give away IP that is generated by Government (Community) support.

Who knows what tremendous benefits to society and the world would have accrued had the Cohen-Boyer patent been available to ALL the world's researchers without paying a tax back to these Government Institutions.

Before you knee-jerk assert that this isn't beneficial to research in the long term, I think you need to come up with something better than:

• Somehow there is a time to sell licensing rights, and a time to give them away, and a morass of ethical issues in between.
  

to support this. Since the obvious benefits of releasing IP to the public are indicated in the cases of BSD and TCP/IP software, you'll need to come up with something better than "it's helped the UCSF and Stanford Universities and researchers" to weigh against this.

We should understand when it is better and when it is not better to license publicly funded IP. Right now, I think the only motivation is the perceived benefit to the institution. As the article points out, had they known that the BSD TCP/IP software would have been so successful, they would have licensed it, and that would not have benefitted society nearly so much as others in this discussion have pointed out the success of freely available standards/software when compared to licensed standards/software.

Re:Here's how they should break it out.

[Anonymous Coward]

That, and since when does 4 (5?) = 2?

Re:Here's how they should break it out.

[jdavidb]

Wow. The figures I quoted included tuition, fees, everything, except books. Throwing in rent I think it's still significantly less for a Texas resident. I knew we were below national average on our state school costs, but I didn't realize we were that far below.

So what about private schools?

[Asikaa]

The headline Public Money, Private Code would suggest that the principal objection here is that state schools might use taxpayers' money to develop applications for profit.

Or are we talking about using students' code for profit?

Either way it could be argued that the college is maximising its assets to bring in more money to increase the standard of education at that school. Idealistically, the more money a college makes, the less it has to charge for tuition, meaning more people can afford to study there.

It's standard practice in the corporate world that the employer owns the rights to employees' code if that code was developed on the company's dime. Does this principle stand for students' work, done on University computers during classes?

How does the /. community feel about a private school selling applications that were developed in-house by paid IT staff?

I'm curious because I work in the IT services department of a private school.

Hiding research results/prototypes is bad science

[adadun]

Science depends on the ability to duplicate research results. It must be possible for independant researchers to duplicate and verify the results of other scientists, otherwise the results might just as well have been made up. If research prototypes in the form of source code are being hidden behind intelectual property laws and proprietary licensing, science will stop moving forward.

If the software produced is the result of the research, then hiding the source code is even more disasterous. Hiding research results it probably the best way to totally cripple science as we know it.

Research must be conducted under the scrutiny of the public eye to be truly useful.

How can we fix this?

[f00zbll]

Given this is the current situation, I am clueless as to how to fix it. Universities use the money they make to fund programs, grants, and other stuff. I don't know how they actually use the money from licensing, but maybe some one out there that knows can post more details.

Some how the idea of using tax dollars to enrich private corporations doesn't seem right, even if it is legal. There are plenty of corporations that fund university research through grants. For example, the CA avocado growers association pays for research into things like soil science. Usually the grant pays for a grad student and a lab tech does the actual experiment for the CA avocado growers project. The grad student does more basic research or their thesis project. I'm guessing that is similar to how it works in CS, EE or Mechanical engineering.

this post is redundant

Cornell?

[peterdaly]

I clicked on the salon link to be greeted by a full page tv commercial style ad. Clicked back, so I don't know what the article says, but I know Cornell just sued HP for a patent they claim HP is using in one of their chips.

Not sure what I think about Universities owning Patents. In general, I don't like the idea, but if it lowers the cost of college it may be a good thing. This may be a good way to lower the costs. College is to expensive, anything that helps is good, I hope the kids who helped invent whatever it is get a piece of the action.

-Pete

Re:Cornell?

[b1t r0t]

This is why I only enable Flash on a case-by-case basis these days, since the time when weather.com had one with a freaking TRUCK HORN sound. Since Mozilla doesn't provide an easy way to do this, the next easiest way is to move the Flash plugin in or out of the Plugins folder. Mozilla notices this change without having to be re-launched. If it's not a Flash ad, you can get Mozilla to block it for you automatically.

Then all you get is a full-page blank square with a little puzzle piece inside.

Look at FFTW, for instance

[adadun]

FFTW, "the fastest Fast Fourier Transform in the West", is an implementation of the DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform) that was developed as part of a research project at MIT. FFTW is released under the GPL, and Section 1.4 in their FAQ one can read that they are using the system you describe:

We could instead have released FFTW under the LGPL, or even disallowed non-Free usage. Suffice it to say, however, that MIT owns the copyright to FFTW and they only let us GPL it because we convinced them that it would neither affect their licensing revenue nor irritate existing licensees.

There is a simple way around this...

[KingKire64]

If you r a student at one of these colleges then whenever you submit code be sure to append a line at the end

(c) 2002 Billy Bob.

Then they cant sell it you have copyrighted the code its yours to say what happens to it. Sure the university could say it wasnt you code etc etc but how many more students would want togoto a Uni. that steals from thier students?

Time to use all this (c) bullshit thats been going around to our advantage!!

Re:There is a simple way around this...

[vidarh]

Whether you put (C) in your software doesn't affect who has the copyright, and in many cases university rules say that anything you create while a student or employee that uses university resources will automatically belong to the university.

Re:There is a simple way around this...

[Animats]

Many schools want students to sign an intellectual property agreement, but if you're not also an employee, you're in good shape to challenge this. It's a hassle, but it's worth it. I made quite a bit of money developing software I wrote while a student. But I used my own hardware, not the school's, and I was never an employee of the school.

Glorified AOL

[delcielo]

The irony of it is apparently lost on them. If the internet hadn't become such a phenomenon, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Look at the revenue and profit that has been generated by the net in ways completely ancillary to the web. In other words, pets.com may have failed; but how many more pc's have been sold because of the existence of the net? How many admins/techs have been hired to maintain connectivity, security, etc. Even burglar alarms/security systems that e-mail page alerts.

The net without public access just becomes a glorified AOL before they had net connectivity.

It seems these people have forgetten what the net has given back to them and the world. What a shame.

Re:Glorified AOL

[Oztun]

They didn't forget what the net gave to the world. They are all just pissed they didn't get rich off it. Imagine if they didn't open source it Microsoft would have probably bought the rights. We would all be surfing Internet 2000.

Re:Glorified AOL

[Troed]

That was indeed MS plans with Microsoft .. something. That thing that was included in Win95 :) They talked about dialups from all local regions in the world ..

They made a very sharp u-turn when they understood that they wouldn't be able to compete with the Internet as they first thought.

Re:Glorified AOL

[Anonymous Coward]

This is off topic, but. . . Glorified AOL is one thing, but you forget that before public net access, we had compuserve; the community around the forums were better than anything that we have today (slashdot included). Before public net access, the local bbs community was active; do you think that you will ever get a usenet group to converge on the local Huddle House at 2:00am? Before public net access, online communities had real people; now people try to force their online personality into something that they read about in wired.

Happened to me

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote a program to convert from a bizarre NASA state machine language into C++.

This was assigned as a class project. I was the only one to complete the project. (What with writing a compiler being outside the skill range of the typical software engineer, and all)

The code was transferred to NASA without so much as a thank you.

The code was also used by a doctoral student in his thesis. I thought it was unfair to give him a doctorate without giving me one as well.

Haven't been back since.

Non-disclosure agreements + corporate funding

[SomethingOrOther]

My PhD relies on doing reserch for one of the major comunications compnys here in the UK. At my university I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement saying I wouldn't publish any of my results without my sponsors consent.(Either that or no PhD)

This can only be a bad thing for science.
Not only is the company raking in all the profit, but suposing I find some data that casts them in a bad light?
(and no, publishing anonymously isn't as simple as it sounds)

In previous years, decent government funding would mean that my data was given away for the good of science. Now corporate funding meens one company proffits, the university gets by, and I get a bit of paper.

Re:Berkeley sued Cisco, yes? - NO! It was Stanford

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who started Cisco came from Stanford, and the original Cisco router was developed on Stanford time for use in Stanford's network, leading to legal wrangling when a few of the people working on the project formed their own company based on what they had developed as Stanford employees. To avoid getting any details wrong, I won't elaborate, but I'm sure you can find numerours accounts from Google.

This is getting pathetic

[xeeno]

I can just see it now. Grad students will be forced to sign non-compete documents. Just imagine. Some poor schmuck finishes his thesis after 6 years of slaving away, publishes a paper in his area of expertise, and is sued by university for breach of contract because he collaborated with someone from a competing university.
What's next? Journals filled with nothing but abstracts and hundreds of blank pages because the results of the experiments are copyrighted? Why don't we just ditch the entire peer review process while we're at it - nothing good has ever come of it.
If you're a publically funded university then the results of your research should be public domain, end of story. It's sad to see that universities are becoming more and more all about the money.

Re:This is getting pathetic

[Ooblek]

I know of one instance where a university tried to profit off a grad student's work. This grad student made a program that would aggregate web search engine results (which is a common thing now, but it wasn't then). Apparently, his PhD advisor was walking the halls with $$ permanently embedded in his vision. Basically, they kept negotiating to try to get him to sign it all over to the university and his advisor. He basically got disgusted and just took his degree and walked.

I've been thinking about going back for the grad degree, and I don't want to get into this situation either. I think what I'd do is keep the code away from where people at the university could get to it right up to the point where I need to give it up in exchange for a diploma. Of course, I think right before that I'd release it open source. They can try to profit from it then, but good luck.

Re:This is getting pathetic

[krow]

Actually I saw stuff like that happening while I was at the University of Iowa. Its one of the big reasons that I left academia.

Re:This is getting pathetic

[Y B MCSE]

I can just see it now. Grad students will be forced to sign non-compete documents. Just imagine. Some poor schmuck finishes his thesis after 6 years of slaving away, publishes a paper in his area of expertise, and is sued by university for breach of contract because he collaborated with someone from a competing university.

Boy did you hit the nail on the head! Already grad students contend with Lazy professors (not always) plastering their own names on publications which were the result of the students work. I can see this now. Here is your degree in Computer Science, the work you did here will revolutionize TCP/IP forever...oh and don't go modifying your code or upgrading as that would be a violation of our patents and intellectual property rights.

Cheers

God bless them hippies!

[SomethingOrOther]

If you cannot make a profit out of it, there is no point in doing it..... right?
Makes you wonder why kids climb trees.

they can try but it will still get out.

[Lumpy]

All it takes is one great programmer to accidently post the sourcecode to usenet or slashdot.

Or simply EVERYTHING you write place it under the GPL.

It'll probably piss off your professor or whatever but it will keep them from profiting on your work and making money from your tuition... remember you are paying them to educate you. everything you do is your property not theirs. ... now if you are employed by them? It's a different story, but then I refused to sign the "all your ideas and intellectual property belong to us" form at my current job. and EVERYTHING I write here has a GPL header on it and uses GPL libs on purpose. doesn't hurt my company one bit it gest the job done quickly and effectively. they can use it in-house all they want without giving it to the world.... but if they try and sell it? their screwed.

The high horse stampede...

[Alomex]

People, people, before you pass judgment you must consider both sides of the issue.

Here are some reasons why maybe IP for universities is a good idea:

(1) It rewards better universities over mediocre universities through market forces. A place like Stanford or CMU is likelier to get a patent and profit from them than Joe Blow Fraternity College.

(2) It helps reduce the gap between professors and industry salaries. Universities have a hard time keeping profs in areas like computer science, business administration, finance and bioinformatics. If they are told that they would ultimately see some economic benefit from their ideas is likelier that they will stay.

(3) Admittedly, research is funded by tax dollars, but so is most industrial research which is given generous tax breaks.

To be clear, I haven't yet made up my mind on this issue, but the one sidedness of the postings in /. was appalling.

Re:The high horse stampede...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not bad points, but I think the reason there's so much concern over this is a different set of assumptions:

(1) It rewards better universities over mediocre universities through market forces. A place like Stanford or CMU is likelier to get a patent and profit from them than Joe Blow Fraternity College.

Is something that makes money "better" than something that doesn't make money? IMHO, not necessarily (and often not!).
Even if it is "better" do we want to reward "better" and (implicitly) punish "worse"? Personally, I'd like to encourage "worse" to become "better".

(2) It helps reduce the gap between professors and industry salaries. Universities have a hard time keeping profs in areas like computer science, business administration, finance and bioinformatics. If they are told that they would ultimately see some economic benefit from their ideas is likelier that they will stay.

I say, if money's what you want, then go chasing it. If knowledge is what you want, then go chasing that. And, in that spirit, I've always thought of Universities as humanity's shephards of knowledge (cf. medieval Europe).

(3) Admittedly, research is funded by tax dollars, but so is most industrial research which is given generous tax breaks.

Well, that's like saying "people die all the time anyway, so I capped the guy. big deal." False logic.

And, another thing.... all this gov't financing of research, be it through universities or through corporations.... the core of the issue is this faulty model:

hard work --> $$ --> taxes --> grants --> research --> dividends --> private pockets

Notice that the chain puts the result of "hard work" into "private pockets" that don't belong to those of "hard work". Conversely, "private pockets" are getting $$ without doing any "hard work". Now, there's the problem..... it's called the food chain of "democratic society".

It's time to leave it all behind us.

Old stuff

[r_j_prahad]

This is not new. My university has been doing this as far back as I can remember, and they've required signed intellectual property agreements from researchers, staff, students, and contractors who participate in research projects for at least a dozen years now. The formula to decide who owns what percentage of the IP derived from any specific project is complex, but it has to be because of the way projects are funded there. One program I worked on was financed partly by federal funds, by an industry consortium, by an individual donor, and by the university's general fund money. The federal funding came from multiple sources, each with their own IP restrictions. The long and short of it was that if you worked on this project, it was guaranteed that nothing you invented was yours. If I thought up something new and unique and patentable in the shower before I went to work, they owned it, not me.

But I'm not saying this is a bad thing, because the money the university makes off licensing IP is used in part to keep tuitions down and offset taxes. So I can continue to afford classes, and I can live where I live because the tax rates aren't outrageous.

Bayh-Dole Act SUCKS!

[HappyDude]

From the article: "Bayh-Dole allows institutions doing research for the federal government -- mostly universities -- to own the intellectual property they produce, and sell the rights to private companies."

Our Government (for the people, by the people) has somehow been lost to the people and is nothing but A FRONT for big business. WE PAY FOR THE GOVERNMENT. WE PAY FOR THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES. We (the people) should own EVERYTHING they produce! How the hell can the Fed (supposedly representing US) give our stuff away to big business so they can screw us in the ass (for a profit or denial of access) with our own stuff at a later date?

It's time for a revolution.

Noooooo!

[Erris]

Most universities are corporations these days. And most of the people in the administration not only treat it that way, but are under serious amounts of pressuer to make a school profitable.

Let's see, University of California at Berkly is a state school. That should make Hoskins a state employee. State schools may be under pressure to trim costs and earn money, and they have strayed into the IP game, but their mandate should still be research and education. What are they making money for if not to create and dissiminate information?

Also, remember that DARP etc was all Federal money. The federal government did not give that money to UCB so that UCB could have a never ending franchise.

Hoskins should resign. His statements violate the spirit of the original research grants and his mandate.

Mosaic

[Lumpish Scholar]

The University of Illinois, where Mosaic (the first graphical Web browser) was developed, licensed the source code to Spyglass for commercial distribution.

Good news: Spyglass re-licensed it to a major corporation, so the university would get a percentage of all sales of that corporation's version.

Bad news: The corporation was Microsoft, the version was Internet Explorer, and it was distributed for free (as in beer). A percentage of $0 doesn't fill the coffers very well.

P.S.: The authors of Mosaic were annoyed by the university's policy, and wrote a new browser at a company named Mosaic Communications. The university claimed Mosaic was their trademark, so the company changed their name to Netscape.

Re:Mosaic

[msouth]

There was also another, less well known side effect. The people in charge at NCSA felt really dumb for letting this thing walk out of there without making bazillions on it. They were not about to let it happen again. So, following this, everything that got started was looked at as being a possible "next Mosaic"--and if you wanted to get involved in it there were all kinds of license agreements and restrictions on it, etc. Or so a friend of mine that used to work there said. This had a severe chilling effect on possible collaboration, and a lot of good ideas probably dried up as a result of it.

What's ironic about it is how much better it proably would have worked for them if, instead of attempting to license it as a proprietary thing, they had opensourced it and kept the project's home/leadership there. Then a splash scree/title bar saying "NCSA Mosaic" would be in the face of nearly every computer user in the world right now, instead of a fading memory in the minds of some tiny fraction of that.

Or something like that.

Re:Mosaic

[Anonymous Coward]

Just imagine if this guy at Berkely sold (not licensed) TCP/IP to Microsoft. You fill in the blanks.

Re:Mosaic

[sheldon]

Yeah, them Netscape fellas were kind of pissed off that they wouldn't get royalties from the University. So they founded Netscape with the premise of selling the browswer themselves for $35/each.

Sad, but true

[Ashcrow]

This has been going on for a while now. My university has it's CS/CE students write code for major corporations for their junior or senior projects. Some people have said that there is nothing wrong with it seeing that it's just another way to keep universities open and provide good education, but there are many other areas that are exploited, For instance, space is given to the highest bidder in hallways and in open areas to seel items. Companies like Victoria Secret, Verizon, and Jarred Jewlers attempt to catch your eye while getting into your class. I really wish that I could learn for the sake of learning and not be 'tempted' by buisnesss men and marketers in my own state university.

Nonprofit?

[domo_jojo]

The topic of whether a University owns it's intellectual property is a really important frontier in intellectual property rights as well as the future of nonprofit taxation in America. On one hand you have a free enterprise system which rewards innovation with cash minus taxes or failure plus taxes depending on the practical aspects of the innovation. On the other hand you have an almost communistic system in place to protect Universities from the same circumstance of having to pay taxes because of our belief that nonprofits should be insulated from general society. U.S. citizens lose billions every month to nonprofits not paying taxes- I do not believe it's that far of an intellectual stretch to demand that either the nonprofit institutions place all R&D in the public domain or pay the same tax rate as any corporation. The knowledge developed at the taxpayer expense (through loss of taxes) should remain in the hands of the citizens.

I find it increasingly discusting when public monies are used to develop technologies only to have a select few (usually not the innovator) benefit the most.

Rebuttals can't include "bottom line management infringes on my research!" arguments 'cus Universities are already run *like* businesses it's just that their bottom line isn't infringed upon by paying the taxman.

Re:Exploit students as cheap labor and get away it

[Greg Lindahl]

A typical university agreement does involve royalty checks to the authors. But it still sucks.

Biting the hand that feeds:

[aphor]

If you think the move to privatize CS research is natural and good, you are mistaken because you do not understand the economics of the scientific process and peer-review. If the universities and labs make valuable software, then why shouldn't they make money off of it? Oh, they should "make money off of it" for sure, I'm not arguing that. What you have to understand about my argument is that you can make money without restricting software distribution. You don't have to say "you can't copy it or use it or see it unless you pay me first."

Economically, it is crucial to learn the difference between economic value and market value. If you say the distinction is unimportant, let me remind you there is no such thing as a free-market economy where economic and market value are fully balanced. There are cases where a thing has more economic value than market value and vice versa.

A piece of research software, in the form of a source tarball, can be compiled into a useful productive component of a machine. It can also be modified, improved, extended, etc. to create a new source tarball which can be compiled into a superior component of a productive machine. The source of the value in any of these elements is the ingenuity of those who created the original source code (or those who created the theory behind it). Most of the combined science of prior history is always a necessary ingredient for this ingenuity and vision.

Newton: "If I have seen far, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." Ask yourself if you could do without Newtonian Physics on the chance that prior work was unavailable because some greedy short-sighted boob decided not to let anyone read Aristotle (for example) on the off-chance something of great value would come of it and boob would be left out? If you think about it, I.P. licensors are usually assholes trying to set up a retirement plan based on the value of someone else's continuing work.

You can't believe in God if you believe in intellectual property. You can't take it with you!

Now the economy is "adjusting" to the wild ambitions of people who discovered the Internet late... People who were around for the whole thing know that the value of the Internet is actually pent-up demand coming from prior licensing bungling with the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Circut-Switched networks are not as efficient as Packet-Switching.

I'm sorry for the livid tone, but I'm tired of all the whining Ayn-Rand type wannabes running around thinking "I'm a good person, I suffer righteously, and I got the other guy down so I'm gonna stick it to him!"

I know (because I'm educated) that the litmus test for what side you're on is whether you believe you're partly responsible to future generations or not. Just think about what kind of world you would like to be born into and live that choice. Damn. I'm too worked up to even finish an argument. I retract everything. Forget I said any of this...

Re:Biting the hand that feeds:

[HiThere]

What they are doing is destroying the research process that they were founded to preserve. They are eating the seed corn. From a long term perspective, they are fools. But that's assuming that they have the good of the University and the civilization as a goal. Probably their goals are quite a bit more short-term, and focused.

But with this approach, why is a university any more worthy of support than any other corporation? They are halting the production of open research. They are charging abominally for instruction. Etc.

MIT seems to be an exception here. I haven't heard of anything that sounds like they should meet the same fate as the rest (bar the privitization of Curl, and that looks like the act of a splinter group). Unfortuantely, they are likely to be caught in the general revulsion. I wouldn't be surprised if in a Decade or two IBM was a more widely respected University than UCB. And I find that a great pity. UCB are the people who created the BSD license, but they appear to be turning their back not only on it, but on all that is cognate.
.

Wow.

[mindstrm]

Please, go travel for a while, get your head on straight.

The US has neither the highest per-capita income int he world, nor the highest standard of living.

As for 'lower salaries'.. salary means absolutely nothing until compared to the cost of living. Seriously.

Re:Wow.

[GlobalEcho]

Travel is not a particularly efficient way to gather this information. Here you can see that the USA, on an absolute measure, comes fifth, with Switzerland the only sizable country ahead of it. (Others are small banking specialists and tax dodge havens like Luxembourg.)

If you measure standard of living as "the amount of stuff you can buy given local prices" the the PPP numbers on the same chart show the USA is third, with no sizable country ahead of it. "Cost of living", which you cite, is best measured this way.

Now one could make a quite valid argument that standard of living really includes things like nice weather, beaches, elephants, or icebergs. Depending on which of those you chose, of course, the country coming out near the top would differ.

Note that historically, the USA is not always so completely in front. The dollar is presently overvalued by many measures. But it is a historical feature of the last several decades that the US is always near the very top by these metrics.

What is astonishing about this is that the USA is both so large and so rich. I would argue that gives us (I am a citizen) a much greater obligation than we currently acknowledge to help the poorer bits of the world, for example by hunting down malaria cures.

Re:Wow.

[who what why]

This surprises me, as a European in the US, so I looked it up on Google... Found this in the Irish Times (just what came up first.

"For example, the United States has the second highest per capita income, with $29,600, and it ranks 20th in terms of poverty. Luxembourg has the highest income per capita in the world, with $33,500, but ranks only seventh in terms of poverty.

So, not only does the US have the second highest per-capita income in the world, but it also has one of the worst wealth distributions... not that this is news. The high cost of living you mention is probably just a symptom of this - e.g. if your rent is high, that money is flowing up the pyramid to your landlord, who probably feels cheated by their bank, etc.

Why GPL?

[Saib0t]

As much as I like it, university work should not be put on GPL. Simply because even though you paid for the work as an individual, corporations have paid taxes too!!. Why should they release the derivative of that work, after all, they already paid for it (the initial one). That's what public domain means, free to use by everyone

You can say that the corps don't pay what they should, but attack the tax system then and not something else.

[quote]The universities should have the power to control how money is made of their work[unquote].

Most certainly not. Why should they have that?

Re:Why GPL?

[bfree]

[quote] The universities should have the power to control how money is made of their work[unquote].

Most certainly not. Why should they have that?

Well they should have it because they decided what to do, how to do it and paid for anything that had to be paid for from their budgets! If the Uni does not have the right to control how money is made from their work who should? You suggest that no-one should, universities should simply give away their work for anyone to use as they wish, this is insane! A simple example, MS watch all Unis, and when one of them stumbles on anything worthwhile, a modified version will appear within a MS release within (insert suitably short time period) which contains an incompatable modification (think Kerberos) which then has handed MS the entire market for the Universites research (that's what the anti-trust case should have been about in my books). Even if we didn't have an MS, any work done by the communal effort of students, lecturers, individual tax payers and corporate tax payers should be protected for the benefit of all the people who inputted into the project. Simply making a work public domain provides no protection, it simply provides a means for anyone to do whatever they want (as does BSD really). Why is protection neccessary? Because as this entire article points out the Universities want to extract money from their work and I believe they are entitled to make the money (or is /. actually turning communist? as a eurpoean who has been called a communist/socialist on this forum so much it would crack me up to suddenly see /. change it's mind and forget the capitalist ideas so engrained in the majority of its readership!)

Re:Why GPL?

[ahodgson]

Corporations can use GPL'd software, just like anyone else. They just can't make a few changes, lock it up, and call it their own product.

student code is mostly sh_t

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that commercial code is great. But few few students have been through the full software engineering cycle of design, developement, maintenance & support.

My company supports about ten university R&D groups in a vertical market. The ideas are nice, but the code stinks.

It's not so cut and dried

[HardCase]

I think that it's important to remember that many universities aren't as endowment-rich as Berkeley, MIT, et al. Money has to come from somewhere. Grants drive research and the federal government has seen fit to give universities and research labs the ability to sell what they invent.

Like many things, taking that ability to its extreme may be a bad idea, but there is certainly some middle ground that can satisfy the university's need for funding and the researcher's desire to publicize his or her work. The approach of licensing technnology to nonprofit entities at no cost but licensing to for-profit corporations for a fee seems like a good compromise in many instances.

Certainly there will be those breakthroughs that just beg to be free. The case of BSD (at least in retrospect) is certainly one.

It just strikes me that a well thought out intellectual property program at a university or research lab should give much more than a passing glance at the impact of the technology that their institution develops and develop a licensing plan that is appropriate. The Salon article certainly promoted a certain agenda, but remember, not all IP directors are money hungry despots and not all professors a zealous advocates of free software for everyone. There are calm heads out there!

-h-

Mosaic versus Netscape

[peter303]

The U. of Illinois super-computer center really blew when they were extremely protective of Mosaic- the first really widespread internet browser. So Clark and Andressen just blew them off and became billionaires. If U of I just asked for a small piece of the company, they would have cleaned up.

options...

[simpl3x]

can i have stock options? i got rich studying at...

Re: Tuition increases

[King_TJ]

No, Universities have not "suddenly gotten greedy". The problem is, they've been too greedy for a long time - and the results are really starting to show!

I place most of the blame at the feet of the upper-level administrators of the colleges and Universities. My father is a PhD, teaching at a state-owned college, and the level of corruption is incredible. The dean and his appointees all give themselves large raises every year, while he announces to the faculty that once again, he won't be able to give out a raise due to budget constraints. He also, of course, feels his job requires the college to provide him with a car.

All of this starts a chain-reaction, where you get only bottom-of-the-barrel teachers willing to work there. These "teachers", in turn, pass students on through the system without ensuring that they've really learned the material. (For the small salaries they're paid, they don't want to put up with fights with students who scream and moan that it's "unfair I got an F in your class!")

These same deans and administrators are more concerned that their campus looks impressive and top-notch than whether or not their teachers are using the latest textbooks. They know that lucrative govt. grants aren't possible without dazzling the TV and print media. In fact, they typically spend so much time being a spokesperson for the college/University, they fail to notice what goes on "day to day" in the institution.

When they do win these grants, do they really help the students? Only partially. Again, grants are great profit-makers for the higher-ups. I've heard stories of schools that hire people full-time just to research and apply for as many grants as possible. Then, these people get a cut of the money off the top as a reward for each one they get.

Stanford ignored SGI, MIPS, Sun, Yahoo

[peter303]

And what did they get out of this? Just a a measely $92 million dollars in gifts from their founders (with another $60 million in suspension). Imagine how much money Stanford would have made if it ran these companies itself. Maybe about 64 cents.

On the other hand Stanford did invest about $3000 initially in HP, plus some low cost land. That only got them about $600 million in donations from the founders over the decades.

It's already happening in other areas of school

[eyeball]

Publicly funded Universities are making money off of their sports team by charging admission to games and procedes from advertising.

i'll tell you why...

[koekepeer]

You asked:

"Why shouldn't they use the inventions and intelectual property that they own to generate more money to improve facilities and teaching quality?"

Because it interferes with academic freedom, that's why. Fundamental research should not be driven by market forces, but by curousity about the nature of things. And universities are just about the only places where fundamental research is being performed.

It's just like corporate sponsoring of university research, if things go on like this, universities will be the place where companies outsource their R&D activities.

Governments should take responsability and throw some more money at research, but they only seem to think about short-term goals. Man, don't get me started on that topic ;-)

Meneer de Koekepeer

The solution to corporatism

[Anonymous Coward]

This trend of colleges cravenly selling what should be publicly owned IP (and IP that by all rights should belong exclusively to the students who develop it) is just typical. Gradually, things are devolving to the point where all IP will be controlled by corporate patent holders and their University lackeys. All ultimately financed by us poor taxpayers, of course. This totally circumvents our constitution and our legal rights -- perhaps we have freedom of speech, for instance, but we'll hardly be able to use it if all the networks are proprietary, and are strictly controlled by some corporation. And, don't you know that's where things are going? Just look at AOL. People who browse AOL can only see what AOL wants them to see. My boss recently fought AOL for days because they were arbitrarily blocking the URL to a public-service site he maintains. This sort of thing is going to happen more often as they gather more power.

I say, screw 'em. How about a nice black market in good software? Build wonderful things, completely ignoring patents, trademarks and all that other bullshit, and then anonymously post it on the web for all to use and enjoy. Bring back the private BBS, where to download something you have to upload something of similar value, and keep 'em stealthy -- stay off the radar. Build up enough momentum that companies have a feeling something's up, that something is going on, but they can't find it, don't know who's doing it, and don't know what to do about it.

Basically, just write great stuff, and release it on the sneak. And, screw the patents.

Cordially submitted,
Philip

Is the RIAA behind this?

[BigNumber]

I'm sure the RIAA is thrilled about this. Now when university professors like Prof. Felten crack their encryption schemes, they won't have to worry about it being published.

If they charge money...

[tercero]

are they going to pay the developing students or give them a scholarship or discount? I'm not pay tax dollars so a company can make money, I don't think I should have to pay tax for a university to do the same thing. After all, isn't a university a company of sorts?

Wonderful comment

[clump]

You just summarized exactly the one aspect of the article left unsaid. That much of the argument is based off of the TCP/IP being 'free'. Im not sure anyone would have guessed the popularity of TCP/IP, so saying they should have charged for it would changed the entire debate.

Universities rarely release into public domain...

[BlueFall]

Universities rarely release software into the public domain anyway. Most of the time, it's under some BSDish license. It's a bit of a nitpick, but there is a significant legal difference.

Wait a Sec...

[drsir]

so now I am paying them for my work?

I don't think so.

I don't think Bill Hoskins gets it.

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

"Had his predecessors understood how huge the Internet would turn out to be, Hoskins figures, they would surely have licensed the protocols, sold the rights to a corporation and collected a royalty for the U.C. Regents on Internet usage years into the future."

If his predecessors had done that, the Internet would have not become so wide-spread. At least not an internet that used the Berkley version of the TCP/IP stack. I think a major reason that the internet grew as it did was because the software needed to build it was/is free. If a free alternative to BSD wasn't available at first I believe that one would become available post-hast. It might not have been as good at first but it would have eventually catch up. After all once the protocols and theory are hashed out, it becomes possible to implement them in free software. It wouldn't be easy but it definitly would be doable. That would mean that any lasting benefit that Berkley has gained from the TCP/IP stack was gained because the stack is/was free.

They dont know how to make money off students.

[Clockwork Apple]

If they really want to make money off the student body then they should look into a locker room. Just put a pay per view webcam in the girls showers. The student still get to take a nice shower, and the school wins huge cash in the real world. But that would be wrong, right?

Book lernin is jus fine, but its gonna cost ya.

Sarcasm mode off...

Is it legal to take public money and make profits?

[ECXStar]

Here's the question I have for /.'s. Is it legal for public universities and federal labs to use tax payer dollars to create software and then resell it back to the public?

This seems HIGHLY suspicious that we pay taxes, the government uses the dollars to fund projects and then sells that IP to corporations for a profit whom then charge us for a resulting product?

This should be in my book highly illegal to take public funds, create something and then sell it back to us. What's the law on this? Anyone know?

I would be one of the first to start raising all kinds of hell with my senator over this if it is indeed illegal.

It's very simple...

[Anonymous Coward]

...all academic software should be free (as in GPL) for academic use. If a commercial company wants to use the code, they can also do it for free, but if they (academic or commercial institution) are going to modify or enhance the code, they can:
a) do it for free as long as they GPL the result
b) pay big bucks to the author for a different kind of licence and close-source the result because GPL really is too restrictive for business.

Costs

[drsir]

There was an article in our local college newspaper about the salaries of some of the people that work at the University where I go. Here is basically how it was broken down:

president: $2+ million/year
head of marketing: $1+ million/year
coach (basketball, football, etc...) $1+ million/year

Don't forget the costs of luring dumb jocks to come play sports. Then they have to pay nerds to take the jocks test and do his homework (I'm not cheap!). Oh, and don't forget about the lexus for his transportation. I think that should take care of about 90% of the cost increases (if not more).

How Ironic

[OYAHHH]

At the very end of the article it explains that Stanford allows quite a bit of latitude in what it's professors can release as open source, or rather Stanford isn't the money grubbing kind.

At the other end of the spectrum is UC Berkeley which apparently is reticent to allow anything to go out the door for free. Or rather UC Berkely has become the money grubbing kind.

I feel it's ironic that the perceived notions of Berkeley being quite liberal (flag burning communist supporters, etc.) and of Stanford being the conservative one (MBA/Lawyer driven money hounds etc.) are just exactly opposite of what is actually the case out there in the world.

More money for...

[Anonymous Coward]

paying those multi million dollar football coach salaries and large stadiums. It's all about priorities man.

Didn't msft buy salon?; this explains the slant

[Benjiman McFree]

If they were truely objective in their reporting, they would have had a hyperlink to opensource in their report.

It's what they don't tell you that gives em' away.

--power to the new mind hackers

Re:Exploit students as cheap labor and get away it

[caesar-auf-nihil]

I wish I could laugh at this...except that's the way it is now in the Physical Sciences, except you don't get royalties unless your advisor decides to include you in the patent.

More importantly, you never see anything from the patents because the Universities get too greedy when it comes to liscencing - and therefore, no one ever liscences it. So you waste your time pursuing a patent when you should have just published it.

As for the Ph.D. - students right now already are cheap labor - more like indentured servitude. You work you way to a Ph.D. and freedom. Students already are exploited as cheap labor and the Universities get away with it in the name of "education". Now all the work experience is indeed practical education, but the rights of the student to work he or she created are almost non-existant.

GPL Comes to save the day!

[mcrbids]

OK. So the school can take something developed there and sell it.

But is there any requirement that students turn over ownership to their code?

What if the product/project was released under the GPL BEFORE it is turned in as an assignment?

Create a project on SourceForge, or geocities or something, post the work, and *then* turn it in?

The problem isn't the private code.

[TheSHAD0W]

The problem is the public money. While it may be a noble idea to set up enormous institutions to teach kids and give intellectuals a place to roost, it's also inappropriate to take my cash, via the Internal Revenue Service, to fund such an undertaking, whether or not I've approved of it. Just because people voted for the politicos who decided to spend my tax money on it doesn't make it right.

So let the universities profit from their intellectual property. Maybe they'll eventually make enough so that I, and the rest of the country, no longer have to subsidize them.

Then again, maybe pigs CAN fly.

Open Source Lab at Iowa State

[PyroJimmy]

The Virtual Reality Application Center at Iowa State University is kind of a testbed for open source, being used as a trial to see if this type of development can really work.

Our largest project, VRJuggler, is a development environment for virtual reality apps and is absolutely open sourced.

We've had great success using the open source academic model, particularly in getting interest and support for the project from people outside the university.

Are there any other labs out in academia that are also promoting the use of open source?

Argh.

[Spankophile]

This is so riciculous.

Without getting too deep in the philosophy of education and the benefits it has for society, isn't it _obvious_ that universities should be "open source" as it were.

The reward people at university get from creating wonderful things is _recognition_. They get paid by the University so that the university gets _recognition_.

The beauty of the university is that they increase the knowledge of the society as a whole, not just a select few who can BUY that knowledge and use it for their sole benefit.

The situation in British Columbia

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently have been a student at one of the post-secondary school in BC, Canada.

The universities/colleges/tech institutes that run F/T programs and are accreditted for diploma/degree granting have had their tuitions frozen by the Govn't for the past several years. While this means that the average student ends up paying less, it also means that there is a further burden on the school as the govn't didn't give more funding to them, it just stopped tuition increases.

Therefore, the schools must come up with funding in various ways. Considering that most profs at these schools could get almost double working a commercial contract, it is hard to keep them... especially when the equipment is out of date or the conditions are bad. The way to fix these issues is to have more money.

Now where I went, the British Columbia Institute of Technology ( http://www.bcit.ca ), we were lucky that some of our depts were sponsored by industry. Also, we charged the companies that wished to have us do practicums with them $$. Albiet a small sum.

One of the legal issues we did discuss was ownership of the code that we produce. While we did code it, sometimes at home and sometimes at school, the task was assigned by the prof, and therefore the school. In that view, the IP belongs to the school since they were the ones that requested the project and it is by implicit agreement that the code is the schools (as we are paying the school to teach us).

I know there is some feeling that there should be some rights that the student should have for the code because they "pay" for education...but I think you are paying to get taught. The method of that teaching is of the school's choosing and as such is IP of the school.

So how does this reflect here... well, with the school owning the code, it can do with it as it wishes. If it wants to sell it, fine! If it wants to donate it, fine! As long as they don't say someone else (other than you) coded it... (copyright laws) it is just fine.

As a student that did a practicum, the deals struck with the companies are between the school and the company... so any ownership agreement they reach is up to them. The standard one is that the company recieves ownership of any work done for them.

This may seem like it is rediculous given that they pay such a "small" amount, however the students are not professionals YET, and the company is taking on the risk that the project won't be completed, that it won't be EXACTLY what they want, that there will be bugs, and that it will take 1 or 2 semesters to complete.

The school gets some money and the students get "real-world" (tm) experience in return.

Oh yes..rant of the day... US Military budget should be slashed (do they really need soo many ships/planes/tanks?) and the money given to research, NASA, and schooling. After all...canada has almost no military..and we don't get invaded. (In fact... when our neighbours try to invade us they get trounced..and then have a cetain white house burned to the ground... and we don't even have a constitutional right to be idiotic hicks who carry guns because it makes them feel like a man)

Attention

[Anonymous Coward]

All software code derived from publicly funded universities should be released under a BSD style license, and NOT the GPL.

The BSD license would release the publicly funded software AS IS. If you wish to profit, you can. What is important is that everyone has the OPPORTUNITY to do whatever they want with the code they help to fund. This would be similar to the non-essential programs written by the US military. At west point, when a proffessor writes a program (for class, etc...), he CANNOT copyright it. Instead it is released into the public domain.

The GPL, on the other hand, forces you to release the sourcecode if you use the original code and plan to distribute it. Even though you as a taxpayer funded its development, you do not have the opportunity to spend your time improving upon it so as to profit.

The GPL is too limiting to be used by the government. Besides, why would the government want to force an inherently political viewpoint upon those who fund the research?

If you don't believe me, ask yourself why the GPL is copyrighted?

Re: Are (PhD) student employees yet?

[ywl]

I really wish that the scenario in the post is true - at least, the transaction will be fair and legally protected.

However, I wonder how many universities legally recognize graduate students as employees. The one I went didn't; the one that I am working in does. As employees, graduate students will have the right to organize unions. The university I went fight hard just to prevent it - it's far better to keep everything the students do (e.g. teaching, researching, sweeping the hallway :) as a part of their education so that the school can easily kick them out if they dare to ask for a contract or dream of a strike.

uhh, no.

[hawk]

Lose the expensive football or men's basketball coach, or the jock's for those sports, and watch tuition go up. Programs that pay coaches like that generate tons of revenue for the university.

Why athletic scholarships exist in other sports, though, at schools without academic scholarships, is beyond me . . .

hawk

Re:uhh, no.

[JordanH]

• Lose the expensive football or men's basketball coach, or the jock's for those sports, and watch tuition go up. Programs that pay coaches like that generate tons of revenue for the university.

Can you support this often-heard assertion?

Murray Sperber's book Beer and Circus : How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education offers a differing opinion with research to back it up.

Re:uhh, no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lose the expensive football or men's basketball coach, or the jock's for those sports, and watch tuition go up. Programs that pay coaches like
that generate tons of revenue for the university.


Actually this is factually incorrect: for the overwhelming number of US colleges and universities. Money that comes in through the sports programs go back INTO THE SPORTS PROGRAMS.
It's almost NEVER pays for anything in any academic department.

Speaking as someone who has written grants in the sciences, it even extends to the non-tech departments. One colleague estimated that the overhead he HAD to bring in to support his research supported the entire English department (which brought in almost no money of its own).

I had to get out of it because it was becoming impossible to get any $$$ to get work done. Everyone was pushing the overhead level up to the point where funding agencies would just reject proposals outright.

But if you ever thought you could approach the athletic department for $$$ for ANYTHING outside of supporting athletics, they would've laughed in your face.

In fact, now that I think of it, athletic funds that come in from the "big" sports at a school rarely find their way to pay for other/smaller
(read: women's or non-competitive) sports at the
same school. Often those programs ALSO expect the
school to get funds from other (read: my) budgets.

Re:uhh, no.

[hawk]

I regularly use Penn State's Paterno library, which has been paid for by, guess who? The annual auction of autographed footballs alone pays for a significant number of books.

I'm flatly opposed to *any* athletic scholarships unless either a) the program completely supports itself, or b) it can actually show that the scholarship will pay for itself in increased ticket sales or some such. I'll waffle on increased alumni givings for winning teams; it would be too tough to prove.

hawk, who went to a University that cancelled football entirely over the damage to undergraduate education that would have been caused by complying with that stupid NCAA rule that would have forced it into division I, rather than using less than half the allowed scholarships in division II (and mostly either half or quarter, at that!)

Re:uhh, no.

[JordanH]

You have to balance this against the huge staff salaries, the huge sports facilities, scholarship costs, etc.

You'd have to prove to me that many of these gifts wouldn't have been made anyway. It's like the goodies that NPR station pledge drives gives away. The people would give anyway, but the momento (the football in this case) is a fun way to frame it.

Like I said, read Sperber's book. He points out that a lot of schools with poor sports programs have tremendous endowments, while some other power house schools show a huge outlay to support their sport's programs.

Re:uhh, no.

[hawk]

>It's like the goodies that NPR station pledge
>drives gives away. The people would give
>anyway, but the momento (the football in this
>case) is a fun way to frame it.

You're *grossly* underestimating the worship of "Joe Pa" in this state :) The sky is blue and white because he wants it that way, and of the two choices for the Alumni Association credit card, I believe he has the Nittany Lion itself beat hands down. Many donations in many places would occur anyway. In this particular case, though . . .

Re:uhh, no.

[JordanH]

• Many donations in many places would occur anyway. In this particular case, though . . .
  

Possibly in this one case, but that doesn't prove the point that overall sports are a net income gain to Universities.

The Internet should have been closed source!

[hyrdra]

You can really spot the ignorance in this marketoid luddite by his following statement:

"Whoever released the code for the Internet probably didn't understand what they were doing," he says.

People like him need to be taken out and shot. Literally. We just don't need them. True, most of us do live in a capitalist society where this behavoir is encouraged. However, one has to ask the question of would the Internet and modern technology be as advanced if only the highest bidders were allowed in?

In fact, I would seem to think less money would have been made if the Internet was a strictly closed-protocol network with strict licensing and the usual assortment of silly patents. It is the open nature of universal connectivity, of worldwide audience that made the Internet successful, and later, attractive to commercial investors. Had it been a private venture requiring royalties to be paid, it wouldn't grown on the International scene and would have been underdeveloped nationally, and as a result there would be no commercial interest. The great communications system of today wouldn't exist because of greed and short term profits.

And it would all be because of people like Mr. Hoskins, people like him looking to make a quick buck instead of trying to advance humanity, unite countries, and create a system of International free speech. And he is saying this after the fact these great benefits have been acheived. He would have wanted it the other way -- to hell with humanity; he wishes he could have had that new Lexus!

They say money is the root of all evil, and I am inclined to agree. It's true, we need money to live, but when an organization gets so much money it starts to do stupid things. One example is a modern insurance-carying hospital. Walk into most of these monsters and you'll be adorned with vault ceilings and abstract art. How is that advancing health care? Is a $250,000 sculpture some kind of lab device? The same is true for Universities -- get enough money and you start seeing more offices like the that of the "Office of Technology Licensing", instead of innovation or new technology departments. In fact, I would bet there is a direct inverse relationship between how much money a University reals in and the percentage of said money actually going to academics.

This article, if nothing more, is a truly sobering realization of how things have changed. If you think about it, things like this didn't happen 20 years ago and most people (even geeks) didn't know what prior art from modern. It's unfortunate evolution has applied itself to the lawyers -- I'd rather see them no farther progressed than a lifeless blob of tissue.

Is the world really getting more self-serving and less willing to do something for the good of everyone or is this simply how things have always been? Personally, I would think helping the world would be a much better gift than any financial quantity. And, as I said about the creation of the Internet -- what goes around comes around. I bet those same Universities which released the TCP/IP specification to public domain gained quite a few financial reapings later down the line as the Internet grew in power.

All I can say is everyone should find a good balance between profit and helping advancement of your art. Too much one way and you can't pay for the heat, too much the other way and everything stays closed and progress is slow -- eventually leading toward loss of profit and eventually meltdown in that field.

I'm all for lawyers and the legal system when you need 'em, but do we really need people whose sole purpose is to find new ways to restrict something and make quick cash? Why can't these people see the big picture and long term effects rather than how much they can make off the new technology license?

Isn't the purpose of technology to apply general knowledge and science to solve modern-day problems?

One sided view

[Aapje]

What about technology that a company wants to use in their software? It's not just that a company cannot hijack a product, GPL'ed software effectively cannot be incorporated in any commercial product they make. For most companies that means that they can't use the software/technology.

This does shut out perfectly good uses. For instance: TCP/IP would probably not be used as much if the BSD-code would not have existed, but instead GPL would have been used. Or some XML-architecture stuff, why would companies not be able to use it? Why should companies not be allowed to build on work of others? Do you hate them? Do you hate progress?

And why is this so important? For the famous hijacking that rarely happens? One of the few famous hijacks is the use of BSD-TCP/IP in Linux. How much code did Linux hijack from BSD without the latter being able to take anything back? Another famous hijack is the use of BSD-TCP/IP in Windows. Finally Windows was a good netizen and this was the basis for the boom of the Internet. Anything wrong with these things? All in all I think you are just selfish, you want companies to pay for something that they can't use.

Institutions compete with Privite Enterprise

[Anonymous Coward]

So local are taxpayers happy that their university is competing with private industry in their area? Do they expect to fund this sort of activity which is not related to the mission of the public university system?

I think we are better off with research in public universities staying in the public domain. If they want to sell that product or research fine, but the license is important and the GPL is good example of the type of license that should be used by public institutions.

Hmm. . .

[cgleba]

Universties selling code for profit. . ..

So a University spends time educating its students so that they can produce code which in turn the University can sell at a profit. . .

"It's a good incentive for a University to educate it's students", you say. "Universities are poor and the students can't afford the tuition so anything they sell to help that is cool with me.", you say.

What is now the difference between a University and a company that hires a newbie and trains him/her OJT? NOTHING other then the students now pays the 'corporate' university $30k to work for them rather then the company paying the newbie $30k to learn OJT.

Too many people put WAY WAY too much stock in a 'university education' and forget good old OJT. I say let the Universities that can not afford to exist go down in flames before they sell code and let all those "poor newbies" that "lost out on an education because of it" go learn OJT at a company. Otherwise there will be no distinction between a University and a Company other then having to pay a fuedal labor obligation to the University for "accepting" your money.

As people mentioned here before, licensing code is 100% against te goal of Universities to contribute to the sciences. Hell, a PHD candidate has to PROVE that they contributed to the relm of human knowledge in thier scisnce -- how the hell can they do that if their ideas are licensed?

If a University can not be a University then cut it's funding, discredit it and let it try to survive in the realm of megacorps. "Licensing" ideas stops a university from being a university and makes it a corporation.

Every Rose-Hulman junior

[yerricde]

But few few students have been through the full software engineering cycle of design, developement, maintenance & support.

Every junior CS major at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology takes a two-quarter software engineering course in which she works on three projects in four terms, forcing students to write things down and practice maintainability.

History re-write

[cgleba]

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. . .

If I remeber it correctly ARPA paid BBN Corporation in Cambridge, MA to put and IP stack on BSD, which in turn it gave back to Berkley so that it could become "public domain". After that Berkley re-wrote the IP stack and added a plethora of tools (I think Bill Joy tries to take all the credit for the IP-stack re-write. . .another history re-write).

I'm pretty sure my history is correct. In that case how the hell this retard, Bill Hoskins, at Berkley ever expected Berkley to "license" it lord only knows.

I absolutely love how technology-related companies and universities re-write history to show that they were on top. I wrote a 20-page paper about MS re-writing history a few months ago that I'll perhaps post here some day when I have more bandwidth. . .

Re:History re-write

[Misao]

If I remeber it correctly ARPA paid BBN Corporation in Cambridge, MA to put and IP stack on BSD, which in turn it gave back to Berkley so that it could become "public domain". After that Berkley re-wrote the IP stack and added a plethora of tools (I think Bill Joy tries to take all the credit for the IP-stack re-write. . .another history re-write).

This is actually described in one of the follow-on stories on Salon (third page); definitely an interesting read.

mis

UCB and UCLA in same org

[yerricde]

UC Berkeley (to use an example from the article) doesn't exactly have a powerful football presence.

Two words: UCLA Bruins.

What annoys me

[krow]

While I was in the University I would see faculty do work that consultants would normally do and just call it "grant getting". So here we are with someone who has their salary already paid and has a bunch of state and/or federally bought equipment and they can under bit the consultant.
Universities really push faculty to get grants. You don't get rants you won't get tenure. A class can always be pushed off on a grad student if research money can be gained (keep in mind that the University racket beats the mob racket; most Universities take at least 40% of the grant money for overhead).
Since government research oney has dried up, Universities are now going after private contracts which make all of this even worse. Toss in IP rights and you have billion dollar companies that don't pay taxes and are state funded.
Billion dollar companies... this needs to get into people's heads. Universites have huge operating budgets, and despite a lot of complaining about how poor they are, they have a lot of cash.

its wrong, but it makes sense

[markj02]

It's wrong, but it makes sense--if you subscribe to the Republican legal and economic philosophy: only the profit motive propels people to do things efficiently, therefore only by privatizing everything do you lower costs and make innovation move into the marketplace faster. It's the thinking that would have condemned us to decades of Compuserve because it would have kept the Internet from happening. It's a classic instance of the adage that every complex problem has a solution that's simple, easy to implement, easy to understand, and wrong.

The government has a place in developing and deploying basic technologies: roads, space technology, weapons technologies, communications technologies. Government support is what made this nation great and powerful. The market cannot address these needs, and it never has.

selective application of competition

[Anonymous Coward]

here we have another sterling example of how universities will gleefully jump on the chance to make more money for themselves as if they are a company, yet they ignore all attempts by many to privatize them further allowing for real competition and results oriented critique. All the glory, NONE of the toil.

My tax dollars go towards these universities whether I like it or not. I would prefer that NONE of my taxes go towards any university, then they can damn well do what they want. However, since they would not then have the government (extorted taxpayer) tit to depend on, they would be forced to play by the same rules as a business should (should because many business get welfare too). Imagine a free market approach to universities, much like training institutions are run today. Instead of semester upon grueling semester of verbal masterbation on the part of the faculty, they would actually have to TEACH. If they failed to teach properly, then they must give back all or a portion of the money. After all, money for services unrendered is theft on the part of the party expected to render services. There would be a real incentive to learn, not just 'go through the motions' to get a degree.

Right now, in the business world (or should I just say, the non-academia) many are getting very good education in specific or general subjects from both formal universities and colleges, to dedicated training institutions. Many see how the training institutions are superior in their ability to cut the BS and actually impart knowledge and hands on experience. Many colleges have noticed this, and have begun to take a similar approach, much to their financial delight. Some universities have departments that wish to employ the same level of ethics and efficiency, but sadly many are shot down by the short sighted (and selfish) bureaucrats within their university.

Indeed, universities as a rule (meaning there are some exceptions as in most things in life) are more like the majority of 'public' hospitals. Administrators with little or no medical experience, and often no medically oriented logistics or management experience either, run the hospitals as their own little mafia operation. They micro-mis-manage the doctors, nurses and nursemanagers in things that they have no business sticking their inefficient noses into, much to the detriment of the hospital as a whole and the patients as a result of this. Many will, in times of sagging local economy, will claim that they must cut back on certain programs that they see as too expensive to operate, and that they are out of money and other assets to take up the 'fight' to keep those services in place much longer. Gee, how heroic of them. Reality finds that these services, often not just vital from a personal opinion of any joe schmoe, but as defined by their county is vital and is indeed funded by many many many tax dollars. The real problem is the pooling of funds. Once they are pooled, the tax funded (and community labled 'vital') services can be cast aside and the money intended for them goes towards other support services, including the profit for the admins. No, it is not this simple, but you would be amazed at the loophole exploiting that goes on. In the end of the year, you find that the hospital is actually not just breaking even, not just profitable, but often is more profitable than in the previous 5 years. Yet no vital services. That means that like in any socialist system, the intended (stated at least) goals and desires not only take a backseat to personal and selfish greed, but now that greed is actually being funded by the peasants against their will.

Yes, I have heard this lament before

[Kiwi]

Bill Hoskins, who is currently in charge of protecting the intellectual property produced at U.C. Berkeley, thinks it must have been a mistake. "Whoever released the code for the Internet probably didn't understand what they were doing," he says.

I remember, back in 1993, Eric Allmann (The original Sendmail devloper), in an interview, was lamenting that if he had a nickel for every Sendmail installation, he would have become a very rich man.

Of course, this would have never have happened. We are looking at traditional market economics: The less something costs, the more people will purchase (or use) the item in question.

The only reason that Berkeley's TCP/IP stack and that Sendmail caught on was because they were the most open-source implementations out there. If Berkeley listened to the likes of Bill Hoskins, people would have simply used some other more open codebase, or have implemented their own open codebase.

For example, when somebody tried to extract licensing fees out of people using his MP3 decoding codebase, people simply re-implemented an MP3 decoder, not using his code. When Fraunhoffer started mumbling about MP3s being patented, people implemented OGG Vorbis.

The same thing would have happened with a Bill-Hoskins-license code base. The code would be forgotten today, and some other free implementation would be the one everyone is using today.

- Sam

[ot] Re:It's more complicated.

[msouth]

Thanks--if mod points were transferable, I would give you the ones from mine (your post's parent).

Great quote

[startled]

From Salon:

"Seeking to control computer-science research by putting intellectual property concerns before the goal of good science has destroyed countless projects."

Just how many is hard to say.

Would it be hard to say because it's, uh, countless? You know Salon's fallen on hard times when they can't afford to proofread...

Re:Berkeley sued Cisco, yes? - NO! It was Stanford

[gelfling]

Right Stanford. Sorry, but there was a lawsuit and Cisco lost. None of the technology has ever been put in the public domain and the exact damages were never made public either.

Wrongo!

[Anonymous Coward]

GPL code can be released by the author (only) under ANY license they like, unlike PD which is UNLICENSED, and BSD which is pretty much the same, except you get your name embedded in the code.

Depends where the money goes...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the revenues from IP don't end up in the President's pocket. It gets "reinvested" in the university. Part of that may well be 'nice things' like fancy furniture in the president's office, but a lot of it goes to recruiting new faculty, renovating lab space, supporting faculty when their grants fall through, and the host of other things that further the University's principle goal: providing educational opportunities. Not teaching classes, but providing opportunities.

Some good hard numbers: my school's balance sheet indicates almost $10M from licensing etc vs 24M from athletics, 71M tuition and 180M for research. The president's salary was $240k.

Give Them the Money

[Anonymous Coward]

Universities have always been about the money. Ever since 20th century America adopted capitalism as the economic Messiah. Agree or not, this is the case, and the Universities are filing in line with lawyers, politicians, churches, all semmingly things that shouldn't be "all about the money," but which certainly are.

Perhaps a hybrid would help.

[eugene ts wong]

It is true that learning institutions should be about teaching and learning, and not *only* profits. However, that doesn't mean profit is a bad thing.

Just because instutionalized education is a "necessity", as some like to describe it, it doesn't mean that it should cost the tax payer bundles of money. After all, you have to eat, right? Well, that doesn't mean that we should pay your grocery bills just because it is a necessity, does it?

Likewise it would be ideal for people to pay for their needs themselves, or find creative ways of succeeding in life. Has every success in life come from a college or university? People too poor to go to university or college, could borrow books, read somebody else's class notes or something else creative. I'm not saying that those are the only solutions. I'm just thinking off the top of my head and brainstorming. Please don't flame. But I digress.

The main reasons for institutions to start making money is to give back to the public or to reduce the cost to the public. As it is tuition is quite high. If corporations want to take work from the institutions, then they should pay for it to help subsidize the efforts of university students. Some profit can go the ones creating the work, while the rest can go to the insitution.

This type of a system allows for a corporation to support the institution in an area where the institution actually contributes to society. This allows the institution to focus on what there is a demand for. Isn't that what the free market is all about?

The hybrid system that I have in mind would allow for an institution and students to sell what they can, but not necessarily require it in all areas. It would also require that all students copyright their work so that it would be harder for institutions to abuse the system.

For the pessimistic readers, bear in mind that there are private institutions and whatnot, that focus *only* on profits, and they suffer for it, because their reputions will precede them and people won't go there anymore.

Another interesting point is that although food is regarded as a necessity, people in US and Canada often eat more than they need too, and at a more "luxurious" way than they need to. I use "luxurious" because I can't think of the appropriate word. Let's face it, how often do we eat only what we need, as opposed to junk food, coffee, pop and other items. Chips? Anybody? The reason that I bring this up, is because in institutions, we also wish to consume more than we need. This isn't a bad thing. It's alright in general. However, people who want more education, and other "educational luxuries" should pay more. That's the way that things are in life. That's the basis of the free market.

In short, we should have institutions for teaching and learning, and allow them to make profits, but not make profits at the expense of learning.

Some facts and rationale

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, that's a whole lotta knee-jerk.

As a former CS grad student, and now a CS professor, I've had direct experience with the tech transfer process. I've never heard of faculty/students being forced to patent or keep code proprietary, and that's just wrong. But forcing everything to be free defeats the purpose.

First of all, all academics have an obligation to publish and disemminate their results to advance the state of the art, regardless of whether they patent or copyright. Copyrighting software is not such a big deal, since, in theory, anyone should be able to reproduce the software from the publications.

When you develop something new, there are two basic ways to get it into the world --- either give it out for free, or protect it and sell it. Giving it out for free only works if there are people out there willing to adopt it in its current form. Unless your project has great publicity and interest among hackers. it will be forgotten when it is released for free. For most projects --- which may be too exotic, or prosaic, or copmplicated to find immediate interest among the population of those who might use it --- commercialization is the only realistic way to pay for development, marketing, and production of a product.

In other words, it depends on the nature of the project as to whether patenting/commercialization is a good thing. However, we never really know in advance, and take a calculated risk either way.

Furthermore, it seems wrong to deny academics a cut of the fruits of their labors. Many of my colleagues who created pioneering technologies that made great fortunes possible cannot even afford to buy a decent house in Silicon Valley.
Academics fulfill their academic duty by teaching, by developing new ideas and disemminating them, and by bringing the fruits of their work into the world --- often, the best way to do this last is to commercialize.

(By the way, academics in the humanities traditionally own and may sell all of their works, such as books, paintings, poetry, etc. But no one minds since they copyright the works, not the ideas.

Also by the way, the vast majority of university patent funding comes from biomedical patents; CS patents are insignificant by comparison. UW Madison gets almost all of its patent revenue from the process that put Vitamin D into milk.

In defense of university research attitude

[bear777]

While the salon article was informative, it is helplessly single-dimensional. University CS research groups release many of their code, and many are easily available online:

http://iceberg.cs.berkeley.edu/
http://tinyos.millennium.berkeley.edu/
http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/

and many more.

The thing is that it's not an insignificant effort to put software into an acceptably releasable state, and perhaps the key is to find a way to motivate developers to spend more time doing this.

I even know firsthand that many research groups even go as far as giving free tutorials and support for the software that they develop. And this is done by faculty members and students who are hopelessly overwhelmed by tenure requirements, doctorate qualifying exams, passing classes, writing papers, solving research problems, and trying to graduate.

So before you diss this group of people, don't forget to TALK TO THEM first. Many students and profs are more than happy to share their work. At least it makes us feel a little less useless.

Re: Are (PhD) student employees yet?

[HiThere]

When and to the extent that they find convenient. This has appeared in prior threads and I'm recapitulating (with a cynical bias). Essentially, if it's convenient for a student to be considered an employee during a transaction, then for the duration of the transaction they consider the student an employee. Then they immediately drop any such consideration.

What makes money will become priorty

[penguin_dance]

The problem with this is the University will then start looking at projects as to whether it would be profitable. Who knows, the next big idea could be squashed because some bean counter thinks it has no potential.

Also, why should we fund them with public money if they're going to turn around and try to become Fortune 500 company?

This is what has happened to the news media. Now it's no longer getting out the actual stories...its getting out the loudest "teaser" that will draw in the viewers and, therefore, advertisers.

Universities should not get into business...

[linuxlover]

Look at what happened at University of Illinois. All Mosaic hackers are from university and the university claimed that the software they did belonged to uni. Students in disgust left and rewrote another browser --> Netscape. The rest, as we all know it, is history.

Even before the release of Netscape, university tried to sue them for copyright infringement. But finally they saw the light and settled.

Jim Clarke says all this in his book 'Netscape Time'. He also contrasts how Stanford and Illinois operate. Stanford EE and CS departments get their 'investment back' in donations (often in millions worth of shares of startup companies). Illinois, tried to cash in on students' work and ended up with a creamed face.

I hate being in this position

[jezerbel]

(will rant slightly off topic here for a few paragraphs but will return after my frustrations are out)

I am doing this at my workplace (University)
Management created a company, says its 'University Owned'. Management and contractors are making money (not being piped back to the University) and spending University funds to woo clients. I'm sure upper management has no idea about this. We are breaking so many fscking laws its ridiculous:

- misuse of student photographs
- digital capture of your written signature using graphics tablets
- disregard for current Federal legislation on privacy
- disregard for University policy on database formats, procedures, development time and development process.

Management tells me to do one thing, outside consultants tell me to do another. The project design is out the winder. I wanted to have the code for the app open source with PostgreSQL running on Linux as the backend DB - was advised by management that Linux was for hackers and we should use Microsofts products. Now the 'University Company' wants to sell the software for $4000 a site licence and who sees the money? Not the University, not the 'University Company', not me doing all the development work - the fscking management.

If you are in this situation now - report it or resign - I know I won't be working there by the end of the month - I'm doing what I love which is development but hey if i have to go back to PC support to avoid all this nonsense then I will.

Phew - anyway - there a few situations where a University's business devlepment unit will actually become so specialised and big that it can exist as a commercial entity seperate from the Univesity. Which in my opinion is fine - however I know that a lot of students studying computer science these days have their final year projects sold off to private companies whilst the CS Department reaps the rewards..

Interesting little thing happened at my workplace where one student group didn't hand up their source code, just a binary.. they flunked their course but sold the code/product for a shade under a million.

Ethics? we don't need no stinking ethics!!

what is more benficial in the long term?

[timelord50]

spawned over 2,200 new companies that generate about $30 billion in economic activity every year

And a handfull of open-sourced research projects (TCP/IP,BSD etc) has generated probably several times as many companies and an uncountable amount of economic activity, not to mention millions of well-paid jobs by creating the internet. I think it's pretty obvious that making public research open has far greater economic benefits in the medium to long term than closing things off.

Making research open means that anyone can start up a company to use that technology. This results in a healthy, capitalist, competitive market instead of one company charging extortionate prices for technology developed with public money.

Double billing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who thinks it odd that one *pays the university* to get an education so one can be a productive member of society. Then the university *profits* from the ideas that the students came up with. Talk about the short end of the stick.

Re:Two quickies-III

[Anonymous Coward]

Another quickie is that they could release some very important code thats difficult to recreate out to a company. Which could then use it to become another monopoly like MS. Talk about bang for the buck.

Re:NOt at all unprecedented--Money trail.

[Anonymous Coward]

"...and then sell/license the results to subsidize further reseacrh"

So what is really being done with the money, and who are the real beneficiaries, companies or universities? What about society?

Re:And that's why....NSH

[Anonymous Coward]

" The microchip is probably more than 30 years old already and i don't see any new technolgies comming on the ner future."

And yet people still keep coming to slashdot everytime a new idea/invention shows up.

Re:So what about private schools?-Bang money.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Idealistically, the more money a college makes, the less it has to charge for tuition, meaning more people can afford to study there"

Sure explains those skyrocketing tuition rates.
Not enough bang in those bucks.

Re:There is a simple way around this...Green fees.

[Anonymous Coward]

".. anything you create while a student or employee that uses **university resources** .."

**which were paid for by whom? Goldielocks and some bears? Shame they didn't use some of that tuition money to buy a real university.

Re:The high horse stampede...AMEN!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone give this AC a good modding up. The last part was very concise and spot on.

Re:Old stuff-new bottle.

[Anonymous Coward]

"But I'm not saying this is a bad thing, because the money the university makes off licensing IP is used in part to keep tuitions down and offset taxes. So I can continue to afford classes, and I can live where I live because the tax rates aren't outrageous"

Explain:
1-Skyrocketing tuition.
2-Most colleges and universities are tax exempt.

Re:Old stuff-new bottle.

[r_j_prahad]

Explain:
1-Skyrocketing tuition.
2-Most colleges and universities are tax exempt.

1. Mine is a four-year state college. Resident tuition is rated as very affordable and, while higher every year, hasn't 'skyrocketed'.

2. State colleges are supported largely by state taxes; my comment had nothing to do with their exempt status. To stay in business, they must either (1) raise tuitions, or (2) siphon off a bigger share of state revenue which will be made up for by higher taxes, or (3) earn income on property they own. The sale and licensing of IP to augment operating expenses is one option that both taxpayers and students in my state prefer.

Eating the seed corn... YEAH! THAT'S IT!

[aphor]

"They're eating the seed corn." I like that better. There's prolly quite a few parables to go along with that metaphor.

I believe good software is always an elegant solution to a well understood problem. Elegant means it performs as intended with a beautiful simplicity. Understanding the problem is never easy for someone who isn't personally affected firsthand. If you separate the affected person (the paying software customer) from the solution designer (the programmer/software-engineer), you just don't get the same quality software. Academics in the CS community will now be forced to deal with the petty and uninteresting personal peeves of the moneyed-elite. Human computing problems will go on the back-burner. Corporations will employ University "Office of Development" cronies to bulldog the best and brightest into submission before they get tenure. In this way they intend to control the "means of production" of "Intellectual Capital".

The real problem is that the College of Business people are making more noise than the Liberal Arts Economics people. Everybody knows you can get a business degree without studying. It's because of the damn students paying all that crappy tuition and taking on all that debt. Business schools are not really academic in nature: they are an alumni factory churning out certified idiots who think profit is equal to value!

The Colleges of Liberal Arts and Sciences are not churning out economists who can explain the difference to us. So, when we, as a somewhat educated people, decide our aggregate path, the business propaganda is tune to which we march--when we march that is...