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 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
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.
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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.
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
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.
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