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."
It's more complicated.
by
westfirst
·
· Score: 5, Informative
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.
by
tburkhol
·
· Score: 3, Informative
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."
It's not the selling that bothers me...
by
skribble
·
· Score: 2, Informative
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:)
-- --- Nothing To See Here ---
Re:The only problem I see with this...
by
Onnimikki
·
· Score: 2, Informative
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.
Happened to me
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
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.
Re:It only makes sense
by
Surak
·
· Score: 4, Informative
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:There is a simple way around this...
by
vidarh
·
· Score: 3, Informative
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:Here's how they should break it out.
by
jdavidb
·
· Score: 3, Informative
$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.
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.
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.
-- Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Sad, but true
by
Ashcrow
·
· Score: 2, Informative
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.
Re:This could backfire
by
Black+Parrot
·
· Score: 2, Informative
> 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.
-- Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Universities rarely release into public domain...
by
BlueFall
·
· Score: 2, Informative
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.
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:Fine by me
by
HiThere
·
· Score: 3, Informative
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?
--
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Universities should not get into business...
by
linuxlover
·
· Score: 3, Informative
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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
--- Nothing To See Here ---
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.
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.
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.
:)
:-P
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?
My journal has hot
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.
$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.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
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.
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.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
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.
> 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.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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.
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?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.