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."
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."
It only makes sense
by
Wind_Walker
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· Score: 3, Insightful
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
by
NerdSlayer
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· Score: 2, Insightful
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
by
peripatetic_bum
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· Score: 2, Insightful
... 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,
--
Sigs are dangerous coy things
Re:It only makes sense
by
ErikZ
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· Score: 2, Insightful
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?
-- Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Re:It only makes sense
by
jandrese
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· Score: 3, Insightful
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.
--
I read the internet for the articles.
Blame the patent bandwagon
by
Crimplene+Prakman
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· Score: 3, Insightful
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
by
jsmyth
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· Score: 3, Insightful
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.
--
jer
We may be human, but we're still animals - Steve Vai
Let's just kill the goose, shall we?
by
Svartalf
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· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
-- I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Re:Not suprised
by
Mononoke
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· Score: 4, Insightful
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.
-- NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
And thats bad?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
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:Don't get me started.
by
Rogerborg
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· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
-- If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Re:Open source, or truely free?
by
bfree
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· Score: 5, Insightful
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?
--
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Re:strong analogy to copyright
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 4, Insightful
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.
You can't have your cake and eat it , too...
by
GKChesterton
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· Score: 3, Insightful
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.
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.
Here's how they should break it out.
by
OS24Ever
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· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
--
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Re:Here's how they should break it out.
by
blakestah
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· Score: 3, Insightful
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.
Hiding research results/prototypes is bad science
by
adadun
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· Score: 3, Insightful
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.
Re:Legalities?
by
nanojath
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· Score: 4, Insightful
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.
--
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Re:Public funding of Free Software
by
GKChesterton
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· Score: 2, Insightful
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
This is getting pathetic
by
xeeno
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· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
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.
-- DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
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.
Mosaic versus Netscape
by
peter303
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· Score: 3, Insightful
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.
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.
Re:The dabate of late has been...
by
Lemmy+Caution
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· Score: 3, Insightful
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.
History re-write
by
cgleba
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· Score: 3, Insightful
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. . .
its wrong, but it makes sense
by
markj02
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· Score: 4, Insightful
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.
Yes, I have heard this lament before
by
Kiwi
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· Score: 4, Insightful
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
--
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Some facts and rationale
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
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.
Slashdot Mirror
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."
------
Today's Top Deals
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...
and
It's no coincidence that we in the
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.
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.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
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.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
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.
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.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
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.
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
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.
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.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
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.
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.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
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
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.
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.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. . .
.another history re-write).
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. .
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. . .
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.
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
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
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.