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."
Let's just kill the goose, shall we?
by
Svartalf
·
· 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
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.
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: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
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.
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.
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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."
------
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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
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.
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.
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
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 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.