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.
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.
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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