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."
Open source, or truely free?
by
dirk
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This article seems to be stuck on the whole "they should release it open source like Linux" idea. I agree that Universities shouldn't be privatizing their ideas and making gobs of money off them by selling them to private interests. But I think they should give them away so everyone can use them, and the only way to do that is to make them public domain (or possibly something like the BSD license). I know everyone will say the GPL is the best way to go, but as they article said, this is for the public good, and that includes people who don't want to use the GPL. If you want to use this code is a closed source app you wouldn't be able to benefit from this (and that includes individuals as well as corporations). I think if they are going to release it, make it PD or BSD, that way the greatest number of people can benefit from it. GPL is a good license, but it's not the freedom something like this requires. This requires the greatest amount of freedom, not freedom with restrictions that your stuff has to be free as well.
--
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Re:Open source, or truely free?
by
bfree
·
· 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
Don't get me started.
by
Quixote
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This really got to me: 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.
No, Mr. Hoskins, they knew what they were doing, apparently you don't. If making money was all that mattered to you, you should've joined a corporation.
Re:Don't get me started.
by
Rogerborg
·
· 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.
This could backfire
by
testy
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
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. There is also the possibility that schools could be found (by a court, for instance, or tax authorities) to be functioning as for-profit entities; that opens up a can of worms that no administrator wants to deal with.
Finally, I'm curious as to how many talented students will be motivated to continue cranking out code for a lab that may take it from them and sell it with no compensation. Comp Sci departments are already struggling with high dropout rates as skilled students leave to make money in full-time positions. I don't see these kinds of actions as ways to encourage good students to stay in school and finish off their degrees.
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:Let's just kill the goose, shall we?
by
dunstan
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Exactly. Look at some of the technologies which were developed by Sun:
NFS - released for free. Widespread.
NeWS - brilliant Windowing system, far better than X. Kept Proprietary. Died.
Java - released for free (effectively). Widespread
To roughly quote Stallman: making people pay money each time they use a copy of your software is the biggest disincentive you can create for its widespread adoption
Dunstan
--
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
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
msouth
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Disclaimer: I did not read the article.
Second, many government research contracts force the professors to share their code.
Can you back this up? I am not sure why it was in the same paragraph with:
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.
In this case, you have a person who realized that decided he should license things this way, and did so. I think that, when it happens, this is why.
I have worked on various projects that were funded by your tax money, and they are now being sold as proprietary software. In that case, the person who got the grant did not decide to put it out as open source. I also do not have numbers to back myself up, but I am guessing that the vast majority of government contracts do not require the source code to be released under a BSD type license.
I wrote something about this on the siliconvalley.com debate with Mundie et al:
Exploit students as cheap labor and get away it!
by
gpinzone
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Most kids struggle just to afford college. Tuition rates at most
private and even many public universities are astronomical. Many students
need to get a part-time job just to make ends meet. If these institutions
of higher learning want to make a profit off their students' coding efforts,
that's fine with me. Just as long as they send those students their
royalty checks when the software those students developed starts making
money. Hey, this will be a great way to beef up the PHD. program!
Get paid while you learn! Granted, you won't make as much as you could in
the "real world," but it's a safe alternative considering the dot-com
bust. And hey, if the software doesn't sell, the student's don't get
paid. Seems fair, right?
I've got the funny feeling universities aren't going to be so "forward
thinking."
Re:The dabate of late has been...
by
sql*kitten
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
we need more money for education... well now you have a choice, either they can sell the code they have developed, or taxes can go up...
If NCSA hadn't been quite so... obstructive, the university probably have gotten a huge donation from Netscape Corporation at the height of the bubble, which if they were smart they'd have converted to cash money. The same's true for UCB and Cisco... probably many other situations too, where companies are spun off, or founded by graduates using intellectual property.
Universities aren't built to make money directly be releasing products per se. You can't even count degree-granting as such; your money buys you the right to attend classes and sit exams, not to pass them. Universities also earn money by conducting research for industry, but the nature of research is that it's open-ended and ongoing, more like a time-and-materials contract (like a consulancy) than a units-shipped model (like a games house).
Universities can make money in the private sector, but they way to do it isn't to imitate corporations. Taking equity in a spin off to exploit research funded by the university itself from an internal budget in return for facilities space is a proven model.
Finally, this scenario is different in the UK, where the majority of university funding comes from the taxpayer. The license attached to that code should make it free for use by UK citizens, but charge a fee to everyone else.
Here's how they should break it out.
by
OS24Ever
·
· 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.
This is getting pathetic
by
xeeno
·
· 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.
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
Re: Tuition increases
by
King_TJ
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
No, Universities have not "suddenly gotten greedy". The problem is, they've been too greedy for a long time - and the results are really starting to show!
I place most of the blame at the feet of the upper-level administrators of the colleges and Universities. My father is a PhD, teaching at a state-owned college, and the level of corruption is incredible. The dean and his appointees all give themselves large raises every year, while he announces to the faculty that once again, he won't be able to give out a raise due to budget constraints. He also, of course, feels his job requires the college to provide him with a car.
All of this starts a chain-reaction, where you get only bottom-of-the-barrel teachers willing to work there. These "teachers", in turn, pass students on through the system without ensuring that they've really learned the material. (For the small salaries they're paid, they don't want to put up with fights with students who scream and moan that it's "unfair I got an F in your class!")
These same deans and administrators are more concerned that their campus looks impressive and top-notch than whether or not their teachers are using the latest textbooks. They know that lucrative govt. grants aren't possible without dazzling the TV and print media. In fact, they typically spend so much time being a spokesperson for the college/University, they fail to notice what goes on "day to day" in the institution.
When they do win these grants, do they really help the students? Only partially. Again, grants are great profit-makers for the higher-ups. I've heard stories of schools that hire people full-time just to research and apply for as many grants as possible. Then, these people get a cut of the money off the top as a reward for each one they get.
Slashdot Mirror
This article seems to be stuck on the whole "they should release it open source like Linux" idea. I agree that Universities shouldn't be privatizing their ideas and making gobs of money off them by selling them to private interests. But I think they should give them away so everyone can use them, and the only way to do that is to make them public domain (or possibly something like the BSD license). I know everyone will say the GPL is the best way to go, but as they article said, this is for the public good, and that includes people who don't want to use the GPL. If you want to use this code is a closed source app you wouldn't be able to benefit from this (and that includes individuals as well as corporations). I think if they are going to release it, make it PD or BSD, that way the greatest number of people can benefit from it. GPL is a good license, but it's not the freedom something like this requires. This requires the greatest amount of freedom, not freedom with restrictions that your stuff has to be free as well.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
This really got to me:
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.
No, Mr. Hoskins, they knew what they were doing, apparently you don't. If making money was all that mattered to you, you should've joined a corporation.
Finally, I'm curious as to how many talented students will be motivated to continue cranking out code for a lab that may take it from them and sell it with no compensation. Comp Sci departments are already struggling with high dropout rates as skilled students leave to make money in full-time positions. I don't see these kinds of actions as ways to encourage good students to stay in school and finish off their degrees.
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
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.
Most kids struggle just to afford college. Tuition rates at most private and even many public universities are astronomical. Many students need to get a part-time job just to make ends meet. If these institutions of higher learning want to make a profit off their students' coding efforts, that's fine with me. Just as long as they send those students their royalty checks when the software those students developed starts making money. Hey, this will be a great way to beef up the PHD. program! Get paid while you learn! Granted, you won't make as much as you could in the "real world," but it's a safe alternative considering the dot-com bust. And hey, if the software doesn't sell, the student's don't get paid. Seems fair, right?
I've got the funny feeling universities aren't going to be so "forward thinking."
we need more money for education... well now you have a choice, either they can sell the code they have developed, or taxes can go up...
If NCSA hadn't been quite so... obstructive, the university probably have gotten a huge donation from Netscape Corporation at the height of the bubble, which if they were smart they'd have converted to cash money. The same's true for UCB and Cisco... probably many other situations too, where companies are spun off, or founded by graduates using intellectual property.
Universities aren't built to make money directly be releasing products per se. You can't even count degree-granting as such; your money buys you the right to attend classes and sit exams, not to pass them. Universities also earn money by conducting research for industry, but the nature of research is that it's open-ended and ongoing, more like a time-and-materials contract (like a consulancy) than a units-shipped model (like a games house).
Universities can make money in the private sector, but they way to do it isn't to imitate corporations. Taking equity in a spin off to exploit research funded by the university itself from an internal budget in return for facilities space is a proven model.
Finally, this scenario is different in the UK, where the majority of university funding comes from the taxpayer. The license attached to that code should make it free for use by UK citizens, but charge a fee to everyone else.
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.
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.
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
No, Universities have not "suddenly gotten greedy". The problem is, they've been too greedy for a long time - and the results are really starting to show!
I place most of the blame at the feet of the upper-level administrators of the colleges and Universities. My father is a PhD, teaching at a state-owned college, and the level of corruption is incredible. The dean and his appointees all give themselves large raises every year, while he announces to the faculty that once again, he won't be able to give out a raise due to budget constraints. He also, of course, feels his job requires the college to provide him with a car.
All of this starts a chain-reaction, where you get only bottom-of-the-barrel teachers willing to work there. These "teachers", in turn, pass students on through the system without ensuring that they've really learned the material. (For the small salaries they're paid, they don't want to put up with fights with students who scream and moan that it's "unfair I got an F in your class!")
These same deans and administrators are more concerned that their campus looks impressive and top-notch than whether or not their teachers are using the latest textbooks. They know that lucrative govt. grants aren't possible without dazzling the TV and print media. In fact, they typically spend so much time being a spokesperson for the college/University, they fail to notice what goes on "day to day" in the institution.
When they do win these grants, do they really help the students? Only partially. Again, grants are great profit-makers for the higher-ups. I've heard stories of schools that hire people full-time just to research and apply for as many grants as possible. Then, these people get a cut of the money off the top as a reward for each one they get.