Slashdot Mirror
Should Public Funds Mean Public Code?
Lisa points to this article on oreillynet with "two opposing viewpoints on whether all software created by publicly funded research should be licensed as open source, and the chance to weigh in yourself." Open-source software (under whatever license) seems to me like a good way to multiply the investment of tax dollars that public funding relies on, but the counterarguments offered here are interesting.
The argument against:
Andrew argues that much of the code generated for scientific research is based on previously written, non-open source software, and this requirement would cause a huge amount of this research to be either abandoned or started from scratch.
As large corporations rarely pay their fair share of taxes, why should they benefit from public money? As your humble os sofware writer pays his/her share then they SHOULD benefit. And so should the public at large.
Publicly funded research should all either be public domain or BSD style, definatly NOT GPL, since that ends up in the same duplication of work. Anything GPL has to be duplicated at least once to get it as something BSD/PD so that everyone can use it.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Why do our public dollars fund private efforts?
I have never understood why we give tons of money to companies/universities/etc only to see the ideas patented or something else, and not released to the general public for use. If you were paid by the public, let the public have the benefits.
What if we paid Company X to build a bridge on private lands with public money, to only be used by the person who owns the private land. It just doesn't seem right.
But now, just because it's software, we have to have a discussion about whether or not the people who pay for it have a right to it? It's the kind of bullshit that could only come from corrupt corporations lobbying a corrupt government - it's as plain as the smirk on Dubya's face.
OK,
- B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
This will probably be modded as a troll...
But I don't think that public funds should dictate the use of public code. IT certainly shouldn't exclude it either. I think that they should go to the most cost effective solution that meets the needs.
Sometimes that means open source. Sometimes it doesn't. Nothing should be excluded.
--T
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
I hate the idea that a large company goes into a University and "donates" some equipment but to use it the school must sign away the rights to work done on the equipment.
So you have Billons public $$ going to support the infrastructure of the university and then with a small( think million $$ ) donation some company reaping potentially huge rewards.
Yes,yes of course! If the public shells out the cash to make it, then the public has a right to use the product for free. That is all. ~Phat_Rat
"Fight The Power"
But not necessarily public domain. The BSD model seems to have done quite well.
And this should extend to not only code, but any research. How can Univ. of XYZ get a government grant, and then have the university, the prof, or the private company who pitched in some spending money get ALL of the rights to the results of the project?
Kind of a dumb question to ask around these parts.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Hello, I think it would be very interesting to make an FOIA request for the source code to some small insignifigant government application. The source code is produced via public funds and belongs to the people just like any other government document. Anyone ever tried this?
Douglas Calvert
I agree with Mr. Dalke in that you can't just apply blanket policies like this. There are always going to be exceptions and fuzzy areas. To absolutely force all public-funded works to provide the source to their projects without considering special cases seems negligent at best.
Having attended a public university (go bruins), I find the idea of universities profiting from publicly funded research offensive. From my personal experience, I know there were enough politicians within the UC system. Let's nip this thing now rather than encourage more professional politicians to be drawn to our centers of higher learning by the profit motive.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
I don't mean to be down on her, but this is another in a long line of O'Reilly advertisments put forth by Lisa.
Wouldn't it be better to just hire her as the "O'Reilly editor" and have her edit submissions?
For all the talk of other sites masquerading advertisments as legitimate articles here on Slashdot, something must be said for the blatant disingenuousness of this submitter and Slashdot's willingness to post her stories.
As far as the topic is concerned, all 100% government-sponsored software should be made available under a BSD-like license. The GPL and its workalikes are too restrictive and are means to a particular political end. A truly free license would allow for public consumption of the code without any royalties.
Code that is developed using less than 100% goverment funding should be kept closed and copyright assigned to the authors of the software.
everything that is publicly funded should mean public code UNLESS that would open the system for expoitation. if it would then chances are the system is badly designed in the first place and people should have their money put into just projects.
the only problem is that a mixed public and private investment problems could create some concens with the private companies, however public code is rightly deserved by the public if the public own the project. the uk is now taking a step forward in opening up public services:
free (as in mp3s) electronic music
Code is no different than any other property...
Are Television shows created with public funds available for my use as source material in my own movies?
Are works of art (like the infamous Mapelthorpe photos) considered in the 'public domain'?
I honestly don't know the answer, but I'm sure someone has thought about this in another domain. I wish people would stop thinking that code/cyberspace is really as new and challenging as it seems.
-db
The argument that much of what is currently being developed is closed is a strawman. There will always be this argument, but the longer we wait, the more time it will take to change when the time actually comes. It would be better to change now, absorb the bump, and continue. (And given the pressure, many of the closed source systems could become open source (IE, pay $X to Joe Roberts so that he will change his code from propietary to GPL, etc.)
Fellowship 9/11
How could it be otherwise? If they license the software that they used our tax money to produce are they then going to reduce our taxes accordingly? Send us all dividend checks? Ha! I don't think so.
The only reasonable way to do it is to release the software under the GPL so that it cannot ever become closed software when used by anyone else.
Remember Lexington Green!
Maybe a center position can be reached here. Let's face it, universities need funding, be it from government or the private sector. If a license was used that allowed non-commercial use of code, but forced a company to pay a fee for it's use in a commercial project, makes the most sense to me. The university benefits, due to selling it's software. Business benefits, due to getting great software for further development/exploitation. We benefit, because we get to use the same stuff for our projects. Cool, eh?
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
The author of the article opposing release of publicly funded works under an open source license seems to have a misconception as to what common free software licenses say constitutes source code. From the anti-OSS article:
Open source licenses rarely require that local changes be distributed. Open source licenses do not set a limit on the fees charged. Open source licenses set no restriction on when, how, or where the source is distributed (with minor exceptions). As an open source publisher I am free to release my source code only once a year, at a charge of $1 million paid at least two months in advance, and you have to accept it on paper tape while we are both standing under the Eiffel Tower. (I'll cover my own travel arrangements if you take me up on this.) If I am the original copyright holder I'm even allowed to obfuscate the code by removing comments, using nonsense variable names, and other tricks.
This conflicts with the most common definition of source code. The GNU General Public License, one of the most popular free software licenses, specifies the following in section 3: "Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange," that is, something other than paper tape. Also, "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it," meaning that if reasonable comments aid modification, leave them in.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If a project was entirely funded by public funds, then the intellectual property rights for that project belong the the public and that project should be in the public domain.
It should not be open source, whether GPL, BSD, Artistic License, whatever! My tax dollars should not go to push your opensource political agenda. The source code should be made part of the final progress report for the project, and I should be able to modify it to my hearts content (funded by non-government resources) without even thinking about releasing the source to my modifications. In the same way, if you want to setup a foundation that warehouses public projects, makes modifications to the code and relicenses it under an open source license more power to you.
I'm working closely with the Holsten act, which basically esnures that when the government pays a private researcher a grant, they're paying for the results of the research, not "property of the labor". You know how a company "owns" anything you think up on company time? (If you read the contract carefully). Well it doesn't work that way with government-funded research, since the Holsten act. You can google for links, the implications have been discussed a great deal over the past few years...
Hope this helps.
-Paul.
Computer software research isn't science research. There is no peer review, people do not publish in journals, there aren't proceedings of discussions on word processors and the like.
Computer software research is engineering. In engineering a product is built for a practical purpose and usually funded by someone with an interest in that practical purpose.
The public funds both engineering and science research because of a commitment to enhancing technology and underestanding.
Computer code, if produced for science research (like a new prime factoring algorithm, or a spanning tree algorithm for communication networks) should be published in a journal for peer review and thus in the public but copyrighted by the author.
Computer code, if produced for a product that is being used for a practical purpose and not to be published for peer review, should not be released to the public without the consent of the author and the funders.
What I object to is Universities blindly forbidding researchers to release any computer code without any thought. Just because people are making money of computer software engineering, doesn't mean that every piece of computer code is profitable.
Just because they're funded by my tax money doesn't mean I get to know what the CIA is doing. :)
The Answer to this question is a resounding...
Sometimes
No really, if it was written at a public university on a grant from a private company, I support the company getting the fruits of the research.
Public funds at a public university == public results. every time no questions asked (unless the results of the research if released into the wild would be dangerous ie: new chemical weapons)
But that is not what this is about, this is about the research software, and yeah if it was all open sourced it could speed up research times and lower costs with better results, but groups tend to be very possessive of the code they generate, and the competitive nature of research today hinders the sort of coperation that this requires.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Granted, if the idea is that *all* software written which is funded by public money were to be open sourced, then Mr. Dalke has a point. But surely, it is a trivial exercise to modify the proposal to say, for example, that all software that is derived from proprietary software cannot fall under this order.
IMHO, if an idea is unworkable in its present form, see if you can modify the idea to fit reality before tossing the baby out with the bathwater.
But what if public funds are used by the CIA to create a piece a software that spies on China or Cuba for example ? would you expect it to be open-sourced ? I hope not : the difference between the word processor and the spying software is, the former is a piece of software that people's tax money pays for, but latter is a tool to maintain national security.
But I do not agree that it should be GPL'd if it was built with public money. Rather, I think that software built with public funds should be given to the public domain. Once released to the public domain, if you want to use the source code in your own proprietary product, though, that's an acceptable re-use - provided that the underlying public source code is never removed from the public record.
It's a question of where the line should be drawn. I believe in the GPL on principle, and I would not shed any tears if all software developed through government funding were GPL. But the forced opening of software that is derived from the GPL'd root program isn't necessarily the best way to go about things. If you release software developed by government grant as PD, then the basic tools are free to the community and there's an opportunity for commercial interests to build upon it - hopefully using an Open Source license at the very least, but perhaps not. At that point it's up to the marketplace to reward companies that keep their software open.
If an institution develops it without using government dollars, what they do with the subsequent code is their business. But what they do with our money is everyone's business. If we don't like what a private company does, we are welcome to not consume their products or services, steering our dollars away from them. But when it's our tax dollars, we do not get the same choice. And I, for one, see a line between people using a free product (obtained out of the public domain) to make money, and people building a profitable product that I can't have, using my tax money to build it. I definitely feel the latter is worse.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Refusing to release the source code and information relating to health fields is worst of all. Money should not come at the expense of the well-beings and lives of people. Especially those that helped fund the research, and those that paid with their time serving as subjects for the experiments
Hardware the stuff you kick when the software crashes
Actually, like most other government-created/publicly-funded works (e.g., the legal code, etc.), the software should be released into the public domain. All software licenses, including the GPL, place restrictions upon code whether or not you believe the GPL is a good restriction or not, its still a restriction.
Liberty in your lifetime
Wouldn't that make a precedent for *all* publically funded institutions (such as state universities) would have to release the source code that was written? Where do you draw the line? I could see a huge domino effect.
:)
I'd be a little concerned if I were a computer science professor-- all of my students code (technically thats research, isn't it?) could be public domain.. that would mean coming up with different homework assignments for every class!
This isn't meant to be a troll comment, but...
One key question in my mind, is if OSS is such a great thing, why doesn't everyone make their source freely available? Obviously there are a variety of answers to this (including flames), but Mr. Dalke mentioned one specifically: some of the software labs use are not open-sourced. It's as simple as that.
With this in mind, does it become necessary to mandate OSS as public policy, with regard to tax-payer funded endeavors? It seems to me to be equally unfair to mandate OSS or not mandate OSS - either the taxpayer gets screwed out of research that is never conducted or the taxpayer gets screwed out of a product that they can't access. Either way, the taxpayer loses. Futhermore, implementing the infrastructure required to mandate OSS could be fairly complicated and costly to the taxpayers.
The only solution I can see is to recommend OSS as a policy, but not mandate it. Obviously this will not guarantee any changes, but government sanctioned backing of OSS w/out regulation might provide the best of both possible worlds.
I've done work for the civil court system and land records offices in my area. Their records - all of them - are public. But it's not like any of their information is "sensitive". Thus, open-sourcing any of their software doesn't present any real risk.
On the other hand, an organization like, say the NSA is publicly funded with American tax dollars. It would be impossible to say that open-sourcing their software wouldn't present any real risk.
It really is an organization-to-organization call.
My sigs always suck.
Kind of like TurboTax, but for free. And if it's open-source, so much the better, you can cheat on your taxes and still blame it on the software :)
Universities today make a significant sum of money out of licensing and commercializing research innovations, adding millions to university coffers. Remove the ability to protect university IP and that revenue stream dries up, and all that lost money would have to come from somewhere else.
On a related point, I'd spun out some technology from university research a few years back, and last year sold the resulting company. I can tell you that the resulting tax bills produced significantly more revenue for the government than their original expenditures on our project.
I've worked on one of these types of projects at a University. There were so many corporate sponsors and other government agencies, each with their own set of rules governing intellectual property, that it would have been impossible to open-source enough of the project to be of any benefit to anyone.
For the parts I worked on, compiling in "copyrights.c" would sometimes double the size of the object.
when it is at public risk or information that is need for secuirty no ...other than that yes...but then becomes a ? of what is secure?
I've been working in the government funded software research and development community for a decade and I must have seen as much as $50 million or more of the Public's dollars go into the giant black hole of software research.
One of the major problems of goverment funded research, even when it is contractually bound to be open for government-related inspection and use (which most of it is) is that the various players all jealously guard their turf. This includes other contractors who, even when legitimately approached for copies of the source which they are contractually bound to give you, curiously develop problems getting messages, getting back to you, shipping you source, and providing you access. You'd think it would end there, but no.
The government players themselves jealously guard their turf. Since there is similar and even duplicative work funded across DoD and government, government reps have no desire at all to share. They view the other similar projects as competitive and worry that if one of them gets the upper hand, their own project will be unfunded as redundant or irrelevant. This creates a situation where the government players -- those who are supposed to be working for the Public Trust -- instead drag their feet and use passive resistance in giving up software to even those who are allowed to see it, such as other members of goverment or government contractors working on the government's behalf.
The end result of all of this is that enormous sums of software gets locked up in boxes and never sees the light of day. About the only person who actively looks at the source is the original contractor. For research efforts, its understandable and reasonable that a research project doesn't result in a piece of software that's used by either no one or the very few. However, what's not not reasonable is that the information itself is effectively vaporized.
This is a completely execrable situation and grossly violates the Public Trust. Not only is the system vastly wasteful of the public dollar, it likewise violates the entire basis of public research: the open sharing of information.
For some time now, a sort of jewel in my mind's eye has been glimmering, and it goes like this:
All goverment software development, with the exception of sensitive projects, should be forced into placement under open license into a high profile source repostory such as Source Forge. This, for every government project, would be the primary CVS repository of the project. Project developers would insert code here and be subject to detailed public scrutiny with default anonymous CVS read access.
In my opinion this would blow open the doors of enormous amounts of software development and be of enormous benefit to the general public. Consider how neatly nipped in the bud all the beaureacratic foot-dragging would be. Intermediaries? None. You want the source code? CLICK.
This should be the new standard of non-classified government software development. The money belongs to the People, dammit! So should the research.
C//
Why should all public code be Open Source? First, since code is now considered speech, all Freedom of Information rules apply. This means that the code is going to have to be available anyway, unless there's some special circumstance, and that contingency is already covered above.
Secondly, there is no value to having non-open code in the public sector. When was the last time you saw NASA as the vendor, when you went to buy a flight simulator? Yet they've probably got better flight simulation code than any other organization out there. And, yes, much of it is perfectly usable in a domestic flight sim. FlightGear is a good demonstration of that.
Third, the purpose of Government R&D is to make the country more competitive and better-equipt to handle the competition of other nations. Withholding the information necessary to do that is like running in a 3-legged race, blindfold, with lead-weighted shoes, over rough terrain. Handicaps of that magnitude are not just stupid, they're economic suicide.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I am a firm believer in the principles of Free Software as advocated by Richard Stallman. HOWEVER, if software is developed with public funds, it should be available for us to use as we wish. There should be no restrictions on anyone's use of that publicly funded code - it should be in the public domain.
:)
Proprietary software obviously restricts my use of what should be public domain code; I won't belabor this point. As GPL opponents so often point out, though, the GPL also restricts your actions, in that you can't hide your improvements (unless you keep them completely to yourself). The usual (and correct) rejoinder is that if you don't want to make your work available for free, then you probably shouldn't be taking advantage of others who do. The GPL is about guaranteeing that the choice available to you is available to everyone else. If government software is GPL'd, though, then no one has a choice. You've paid your taxes, you have moral ownership of the code*, but you can't legally do with it as you wish.
Let the software become public domain. Do you want to GPL your improvements? You are free to do so. Do you want to close off your improvements? You are free to do so. Will the GPL improvements code wipe the closed source improvements off the map? I believe so, but that's a rant for another day.
*P.S. Don't come back with any stupid analogies with physical property owned or developed with public funds - the analogy doesn't hold. I can't do anything I want with public lands - but I can sell pictures I take of public lands. That's the closest analogy between physical public property and publicly developed intellectual property.
P.P.S. Smart analogies are OK
Of course not. Just because our taxes pay for something that the government makes, that doesn't mean that it should be posted for all to see. Take for example code that the NSA writes. I would consider it a matter of national security that this would -not- be available for nationals and non-nationals to examine our latest code crackers and know how to avoid our strengths and exploit our weaknesses.
Blaze a trail to the New World
"Creates jobs" implies that jobs wouldn't exist without someone owning something.
That's simply not true, although it is fundamental to the capitalist faith.
Lenin? Is that you?
Is that the best you can come up with? Can you provide me a one good reason why the PUBLIC who paid it all should not have the benefits "for free" (=without the middle-man who's just skimming the cream) before the fatcat corporations?
In this situation, software companies are the pirates and the public is the victim.
Does the DMCA apply here?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Essentially, the arguments against complain that much research couldn't happen if it had to yield open source software because it builds on non-open source software. This ignores the fact that software developed as a result of this research cannot be distributed at all, open or closed source, as it stands today. The writer's objection only applies to code which researchers do not have the license to redistribute.
The sensible thing to do, then, to address the concerns of both parties, is to mandate that any software which is developed by public funds and then distributed be distributed under an opensource license. The real concern with software developed using public funds (IMO) is that it not be used to the exclusive profit of one individual/group/corporation while being denied to others who contributed the funds. My problem isn't when the software stays in the lab. It's when citizens' tax dollars contribute to the profits of some megacorp and citizens are then unable to access the results of their contributions.
.sig: file not found
I seem to recal that the govt can use this publically funded research free of charge even if a business owns the patent.
If it is good enough for uncle sam it should be good enough for me.
...please take the time to examine my other comment. Putting something under the GPL does not negate any of the original copyright holder's rights. That is why, for example, a copyright holder can place a work under the GPL, and then sell that work to a commerical company under a closed-source license.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
The theory with open source is that the everyone can look over it, find bugs, fix bugs, submit fixes, and the world is a happier place...
Imagine this in place in a system where the government uses/makes opensource software.
Mind you I am for this... but imagine
1) Make good application
2) Make code public
3) Person A. finds bug, reports it
4) Person B. finds a way to fix it
5) Gvnt thinks its a good idea to look over the fix first
6) rootkit released
7) (5-6 months later patch is accepted)...
By definition a patent must describe the process in doing something. Grants are used for research rather than construction.
A better analogy would perhaps be having a university find a way to build a very strong bridge. They would then patent the method and build very strong bridges for other people (or more likely have a company build bridges for them).
By definition the patent makes the process, but not the implimentation of the very strong bridge (tm) public domain. Failure to actually *build* the bridges isn't exactly helpful, and will likely make said university less likely to recieve grants in the future.
Why should it be open source? Why not just allow public access to the binaries, or somthing along those lines?
That way, it could benefit everyone. People could start their own closed-source companies with it, and thereby expand the economy. GPL projects could also arise out of public code, because there is nothing that says you can't take public domain code and start a GPL based project with it.
Most definitely, publicly funded code should remain public thereby keeping control of the code out of the hands of both greedy closed-source developers and of GPL based projects that force developers to release improvements. With public domain or BSD code, both groups could benefit.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Quote: "These packages are distributed with source code but are not open source because there are restrictions on redistributing the code"
so what ? It's still open source. If he doesn't know the difference he shouldn't be commenting on the subject.
While I, in the long run, would like to see all code free, the really important thing for science is that the analysis is open to scrutiny. The code contains the details of this analysis, so it must be available to scrutiny. If the analysis isn't open to scrutiny, it isn't science.
However, this does not necessarily imply that it has to be Free Software or Open Source Software in the sense used by FSF or OSI. It only means that you get to see, but not touch.
While a lot of proprietary scientific software does follow this model, there is usually some code that you can't see, and I find that hard to live with. My own thesis is based entirely on free software.
If you publish all code, then the scientific requirements are taken care of, but there are other arguments that needs addressing as well, namely what serves the public and scientific advancement best. In the long run, I think Free Software does, but it'll take some time.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
This is the equivalent of walking up to a cop on the street and DEMANDING use of his (or her) gun since our tax dollars paid for it. While public funding=free code sounds like a good idea, it needs more thought first.
dkc
Seeing as most college professors are more interested in getting grants than in actually teaching students, I propose a simple solution:
If you want a grant, your results become open source. No, don't steal from "closed source," come up with your own stuff, and it has to be open source, or you're not getting any money.
If you plan on making money off of your research, you're not getting a grant. The public should not be forced to pay for your profit, no matter what "societal benefits" your getting rich may provide.
~ now you know
So if the argument about public $$ is to hold, then the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. all should release the details of their inner workings . . . I can't see anybody high up accepting this . . .
If they want to keep the benefits for themselves then they should be content with such funding as the FREE MARKET will provide, period. If the free market won't fund it then it can't have been worth much right? Or maybe the dominant ideology of my country is just a sham, I dunno.
They wouldn't want to be called thieves, parasites, and defrauders of the public treasury I'M SURE --Right?.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
Fact is, private are should not be subsidized by the government, period. And because PBS receives funding from the government, it is not "free" to perform the most noble function of a free press - to criticize the government. Logic can dictate only one of two answers; either 1) All work done at taxpayer's expense should be freely available to the people that payed for it, or 2) No work unrelated to the fundamental necessary functions of government should be paid for by the taxpayers. Personally, I prefer the latter.
Computer code, if produced for science research (like a new prime factoring algorithm, or a spanning tree algorithm for communication networks) should be published in a journal for peer review and thus in the public but copyrighted by the author.
Just FYI, most journal publishers actually make you sign your copyright over to them as compensation for administrating the peer review process.
For example, a particular project was based on funds from both the NSF (public) and a private company (approx. equal contributions from both). So what happens here -- do I release half of my work?
While I'm all for open source, free IP etc. the principle that public funds => open source cannot be easily applied. In my opinion, the scientific principles / protocols / algorithms should be made public, but IMHO implementation should not be covered by this.
Just my $0.02 worth.
Mr. Dalke seems to have a good point, trashing
publicly funded research for the sake of the GPL
isn't helping.
However, I can't seem to see what would be wrong
with requiring all *new*, publicly funded research
software projects to be open-source.
We know the answer: Keep it proprietary, so the
researchers and universities can cash in on the
publics investment.
Its called a risky investment on the corporations part. Most of the equipment that is donated is just used by some lazy grad students to IM or mud on.
I know the answer to this, because I spent a lot of time at a university. It's because the public funding that universities get is a pittance compared to what it costs to operate them.
This is because the citizens want guaranteed state university systems with ridiculously low tuition and high teacher/student ratio, but they don't want to pay any taxes. Somebody else should do it, and they'd better well damned do it. This absolutely requires universities and the like to make money elsewhere. They sell football tickets, and they sometimes sell software.
I don't like it, either. But if you don't like it, stop complaining about how high your taxes are and stop voting for politicians that promise to lower your taxes.
I am not a big fan of companies being able to use research done at institutions to the exclusion of others.
However, I think that they should have a right, just as everyone else does, to take the code and use it in whatever way they want, even if they want to modify the code and then not release it.
It should truly enter the public domain, with no restrictions on its use.
In other words, I would not want the code released under a restrictive code like the GPL that would require the company to do certain things in order to use the code.
My thoughts?
1) The company pays taxes and has an equal right to the code.
2) Relate computer code (and other research) to things in mathematics. If I take a method of mathematical approximation, for example, and impliment it in my calculator, should I have to release the code simply because the mathematical algrithm was previously published by a university? Where do you draw the line?
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
I started reading this article with my mind pretty much made up at first: if the public paid for it, the public should have it. Then I started reading the article, and little issues starting popping up all over.
Say I'm a CS grad student at some university. In the process of getting my degree I end up writing a great deal of code. Some of it's written on my home computer. Some is written on university mainframes. A little is borrowed from open source. A few tools are paid for, but aren't intrinsically part of the final package.
I get the degree, and now it's time to make money. Only now do I realize my predicament. I can't sell that code because it was written partially on university money, partially on my tuition. I can't even reuse the idea, because the idea was also developed partly with public money. Is my shiny new diploma worth it?
You could say it is, because I ought to be quite marketable to BigCos. But what if I don't want to work for a BigCo? What if I want to start my own business? Should I be able to leverage some of that I wrote in college, considering how much I paid in tuition, home computer time, and other out-of-pocket expenses?
I could build even more upon the idea, and in fact I'm in a prime position to do so because I'm now one of the foremost specialists in that area, except that it would be very expensive. I'd likely have to seek outside funding, which means giving up some of the rights. Which in turn means seeking legal expertise, which means even more money. I suppose starting a restaurant requires every bit as much investment, so maybe it's okay. But damn, it sure seems like more work than it ought to be.
One more issue. What if I know all this before I write a single line of code? What effect will this have? Will the typical student hold his cards close, doing only part of the project on public money, and save the real juicy stuff for when it's time to make a profit? Maybe that's the way to go.
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
Obviously you've never read CACM, JACM, or any of the other peer-reviewed journals for software development and research.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Hey, aren't you Americans tired of seeing tax dollars, the ones that go into ARPA and University research, etc., used to developed technology for MICROSOFT????!!!?!?! ?
It's called stealing. The United States Government steals technology, developed with tax dollars (what, you thought it was Corporate donations? HAHAHAHAHAHA), and gives it to industry (usually by allowing law to "bend" so as to make markets available).
In the old days, this was called payola. Now, it's called the New Economy. Jerks!
Many times the public is only one source of funding for universities and research companies. If a particular software project received 50% of its funds from the public, what should it do then? Take out all the comments?
You could argue that public funds should not go to closed source projects in the first place, but I would argue that the government should look to fund projects that benefit the public upon completion. Any product that doesn't (or reasonably appear to) benefit the public in some way should not be funded in the first place, regardless of the benefit of releasing the project's source code.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Views presented here are quite simplistic views of what happens at a university. Most researchers are accustomed to releasing their results into the public domain for inspection, review, and improvement -- this goes for both articles and code. Remember the articles about "opening up" research journals? Most of those in favour were the researchers themselves. Furthermore, I don't understand the argument that large companies can "dictate" what gets done with research at a university, somehow suggesting that this also extends to public funding. In general, industrial collaboration occurs under specifically worded contracts, which are usually open from the researcher's perspective -- why would a university researcher sign anything that prohibits him/her from publishing?
Besides, most often it's not some huge company locking up research, but the profs and grad students themselves who start companies based on their research (where do you think all these tech startups come from?). I fear that the knee-jerk "open the source" response would discourage university researchers from doing commercially interesting work, because it would be more difficult for them to commercialize it on their own terms. The unintended effect would probably be to drive talented researchers into commercial labs (where the source is closed anyway), or to obfuscate their code so badly so as to make it worthless.
Furthermore, how do you define "public funding"? The professor's salary is usually subsidized by the government, so is everything the professor produces to be made public? And how do you "requrire" the open release of source? Would an auditor be sent to my lab to ensure that all my source is being released, and I'm not holding anything back?
Most research has little direct commercial value, and reserchers are normally happy to release their source. Why not leave the decision up to the researcher?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
My doctoral work was funded partially by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council - a British Government funding body) and partially by SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals (Now GSK). This is not unusual in British Universities, and I guess the same holds for American Universities.
If my code was to be released, would I have to work out which parts were publically funded, and which were not?
The University's IP lawyers have obviously thought about this in the past. There is a clear contract stating ownership details.
As it happens, the more useful parts of the code I developed are now released under the GPL.
Public funds do not equate to world funds. If a country's tax dollars support a university project, why should everyone in the world get access to the source, instead of only that country's tax payers? If public funds were generated globally, then I would be expect access to source of publicly funded project. The UN comes to mind as a potential target. As a side note, are not 'Grants' more like donations than purchasing a service?
1. Status quo = Only corporations benefit
2. BSD + Public Domain = Everybody can benefit
3. GPL = Only GPL users benefit
And why should the greedy corporations benefit from the public funding?
Why should a public infrastructure discriminate between a company or an individual?
I release all my work into the public domain, because I'm more interested in my work being used and available then keeping companies from profiting off it. Why shouldn't all research enjoy the priveledge to be shared with EVERYONE with no strings attached?
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
s/march of programs/march of progress/
Choice of masters is not freedom.
I think you have some (common) misconceptions about the nature of free software, and since you were very polite and articulate in making your points I hope the respondents will be in return.
First, you are correct in thinking the focus of the GPL is not on your firm's ability to maximize profit, but to maximize users' rights; although you may bemoan these provisions when you are on the programming side of your relationship with your client, you will welcome them when dealing with the software you use.
Your client benefits from having the source code to your modifications--you may not like it, but it means your client's staff or other consulting companies that offer them a better deal in the future can understand what's going on. If you had used a non-free OS like Windows, and Microsoft decided to change their OS in a backwards incompatible way, your client would be screwed. Do you want your client to be screwed after dealing with you? How would you feel if the situation were reversed?
In the particular relationship you describe, you are the vendor and your client (not you) is benefitted by using free software. But in many other relationships, you are the client and will benefit because you've used free software.
Another misconception that you have is that anything touched by GPL tools must be released under the GPL. This runs counter to practice and although IANAL (I am not a lawyer) I don't think it's true. Your company could probably benefit from bringing your issues to the Free Software Foundation and asking them for help in complying with the GPL. In particular, I don't think every program compiled with gcc must be released under the GPL, or every script using the Perl interpreter, and so on. In fact, *BSD uses gcc so I dont' think it could be GPL.
Thirdly, you seem to be under the impression that Linux has a controlling force, like a company, that determines its direction, and that the main focus of Linux is to "compete" with Windows. The focus of a free OS is to provide a free and functional alternative to non-free OSes for those that want it. This is an alternative that would not otherwise exist, and it makes the world a better place by empowering the users of software, who otherwise have very little in the way of rights for the software they use.
Lastly, there are other open-source OSes that may have licenses you prefer. In particular it sounds like the BSD variants, which can be used to produce non-free products, may fit your needs better. However, I would still encourage you to consider using free (not just open-source) software.
Although it takes a little getting used to, and is sometimes hard to conceive, free software has many benefits for you and your clients. I hope you keep an open mind, make an effort to learn about free software a little, and consider using it in the future.
demi
Appropriate mods:
I do believe you are incorrect, for these reasons: (+1, interesting)
Fuck you, you cock-monger, for these reasons: (-1, flamebait)
Is this so hard to grasp? Cockmonger?
The idea behind Dole/Baigh (as I see it here, I have not done exhaustive research) was to speed up science by injecting a profit motive into it. The ability to sell my science to Enron when the work is done is a HUGE motivator to spend 20 hours a day in the lab to get it done quickly to get paid quickly. If the government's goal in funding the research is to get out a cure for cancer today instead of 20 years from now, then the goal is met whether I have to release the formula to everyone or if Enron is the only producer.
On the other hand, requiring an Open Source release speeds up science by allowing others to build upon the past efforts of others. Thus, if my research were to figure out how cancer cells reproduce, then John Smith now has access to it, so he can produce HIS cure for cancer. This also might reduce the time from 20 years to 2 years.
The key is that either way, the government gets its cure for cancer, so from many lawmakers points of view, neither method is inherently better. This is probably a decision best made on a case-by-case basis. If the government is paying for someone to develop an extensible education system, then Open Source makes sense from a look-ahead point of view. If the government is paying for someone to develop a powerful a chemical analysis program to encourage drug development, then it may make sense to let Bayer buy it to produce the profit motive. The possibilities are too broad to entrench in law.
Andrew Dalke writes:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" -- Article I, Section 8, Clause 8
That seems to me a very clear statement that a public good--the Progress of Science--can be achieved by keeping "Writings" exclusive to the author.
This is a complete misinterpretation of the clause. If you go back to the original copyright laws -- the ones written by the authors of the Constitution, you will find that the Framers required, as a condition of copyright, that the works be published and distributed to the public in order to qualify for copyright. Works that were kept "exclusive" to the author, were ineligible for copyright. This is how patent law works -- if you want a patent, you must disclose to the public how your invention works. You cannot obtain a patent on a device, and simultaneously keep the operation of that device a secret. This is how copyright originally worked, before the 1976 rewrite.
In phrase "exclusive Right" was intended to be understood in the context of required publication. The "exclusive Right" is the right to exclude others from duplicating your invention or writing, not the keeping of writings "exclusive" to the author. The reason why the granting of exclusive rights -- the right to exclude -- was considered a tolerable evil was quite simple -- Such rights were only granted on condition of publication! The public good was that the works were published so that the public could learn from them, and from their examples, create new works! Hardly the case with the "licensed, unpublished, proprietary code" that Dalke is so fond of.
In fact, the keeping of writings exclusively to the author is exactly the problem that copyright was invented to solve!
The first copyright law covered books, charts, and maps. The inclusion of maps was no accident or afterthought. One of the problems in 18th century navigation was a lack of accurate maps. Mapmaking was a difficult, time-consuming, expensive process -- just as software development is today -- and with no way for mapmakers to protect their investments, they resorted to licensing agreements to restrict their users, just as software companies do today. With all of these secret maps, licensed restrictively to ship captains, very little progress was being made in accurate map-making. The problem was that no one could legally compare maps to each other, because all of the maps were locked up under non-disclosure agreements. Copyright was intended to change the situation by granting a monopoly over the reproduction of books, maps, and charts, in exchange for open publication of the works.
Dalke's misinterpretation turns the entire purpose of the Monopoly clause on its head. On the other hand, he can be forgiven for not understanding the purpose of copyright -- most of copyright law has been turned on its head in the last quarter century, beginning with the disasterous rewriting of the copyright code in 1976, and continuing with the disasterous decision to grant copyright protection to object code, and not requiring the publication of source code.
I have a brief analogy. Imagine that you, a young student, aspiring to become a novelist. A good teacher would tell you to read as many novels as you can by your favorite authors, because it's only by reading other people's great works, that you learn how to create your own great works. Imagine if you were told, "If you want to be a novelist, you may not read other people's novels -- that's illegal. You have two choices -- either learn to write from scratch, starting from grammar books, and moving on to short stories, and finally novels -- or alternatively, you can get a job with a book publisher which will permit you to read other people's novels, under strict non-disclosure agreements.
I don't think that such a system would result in very good novels, but that's exactly the situation with computer software. There's plenty of good and bad computer software, and millions of young computer programmers who would like nothing more then to be able to read and learn from that software, but the vast majority of it is locked up, never to be seen by more then a handful of people. Such software does NOT advance the progress of science. Science is advanced by publication, not by secrecy. Dalke's theory seems to be that things are ok, because "real" researchers like himself have access to the source code through their institutions, but for every elite, privileged researcher who has access to the source code, there are thousands of other people who do not, and are unable to contribute anything. They are locked out.
If we really wanted to improve the state of software, and everyone talks about how poor the quality of commercial software is, the first step is to require, as a condition of copyright, the publication of complete source code in conjunction with any object code. The problem is that our copyright law, particularly with respect to software, is so completely dysfunctional, that it no longer serves its purpose -- to build a public domain that others can draw from, learn, and improve upon.
The sole exception to the software copyright fiasco is the software published under the GPL. By mandating public disclosure of source code, programs published under the GPL fulfill the original purpose -- and mandate of copyright. The results validate the original purpose and design of copyright -- to promote scientific progress, by providing an openly published base of work that can be built and expanded on by others.
Actually, I read them as often as possible. And in them, software code is rarely published but design decisions are discussed and analyzed.
Sure, that's the status quo when it comes to publishing articles. However, the scientist still retains ownership of the results of the work. If the scientist wanted to, he could write another paper, or present the results in a different form elsewhere.
shouldn't be allowed to touch computers.
Its a terrible mess when they do...
(ask any CS person working in biotech)
If my money is paying for it, I want my share of ownership. If someone else is going to monopolize and profit from it, they can pay their own development costs.
A lot of the times, the software can't be released because of complex licensing arrangements. For instance, my advisor's PhD thesis used a proprietary GUI library for Scheme. He can release his code, along with the code for the Scheme runtime library, but you can't run it because he can't release the GUI library.
Software isn't mathematical proof. This is my biggest problem with software. It's so hard to guarantee certain behavior. However, with recent advances in proof carrying code [Appel, et al], we can look forward to a day when black box software libraries come with guarantees that we can check against.
Public funds do not equate to world funds.
You have a point, though I'm not sure I agree with it. However, from a legal perspective, it's easy to fix - write a license that only permits use by citizens or inhabitants or whatever of the nation that produced it.
The proper answer is that the software they produced with taxpayer money should be in the public domain. That way anyone can profit from it. This type of software should be considered part of "the commons". The GPL is only good for using copyright to maintain control. The original creators of taxpayer funded material SHOULD NOT have control over what anyone else might do with that code.
If Ashton Tate had not been able to pick up on PD code originally produced by NASA, we would have never seen products like dBase, Clipper, or FoxPro. NASA certainly would have had no interest in the continuing development of what was for a time quite a lucrative market.
Public domain also means that if the code needs proprietary components, that those components won't have their copyrights "infected" by the GPL. So if Coder DooD writes a gene sequencing program in VB (as part of a taxpayer funded research project), his source code will be PD, but not MSFT's runtimes and not the thrid party grid control he used.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Profs get their reputations from publishing research results which are thought highly of by knowledgeable colleagues, and tenure, promotions, jobs at better universities, and Nobel prizes all follow
Nobel Prizes... I'll agree with that, but all of those other benefits are the direct result of pulling in the most grant money, and nothing else.
~ now you know
but I don't seem to get to take one of those out for a spin anytime I want.
Oh, that's military, you say, that doesn't count.
How about the money I pay for roads, schools, Amtrak -- I don't get to do whatever I want with those.
1. A law is passed, and now any project funded to any extent by public money is required to be released to the public (excepting classified work, blah blah blah).
2. Millions of corporate sponsors withdraw their aid from academia, since they can't get any money out of it, and instead fund their private research labs.
3. Thousands of universities file for bankruptcy for lack of funding.
Some compromise would be needed. Every project will very likely require an open-source component, and a commercial component. You can't just work the public funding like a loan, and say that if you want to sell the software, fine, but the first profits go toward paying off the loan. That fixes the money problem, but of course there's still the issue of who controls the intellectual property.
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
They make an 'ass' out of 'u' and 'me'.
~ now you know
And more to the point, I would think that the ACM would take umbrage at CACM being classified as a journal of "software development and research"...! There is a LOT more in all those magazines than that.
BUT Firstly, I believe that if it's paid with public money, the code needs to be public.
However, like the article points out: There are cases where a researcher augments proprietary code, thus is unable to release the code to the public.
There should be a provision for cases like this, but this provision should be made very difficult to prevent abuse (Everybody saying thier an exception).
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Stewart and Mangalam should probably just limit it to code that doesn't extend proprietary code, or, say, a diff of the added and the proprietary code (so, given a license for the code, you could reproduce the work, although redistribution of the final work would still be impossible).
Dalke brings up some good points about the difference between open source and openly distributed. Stewart and mangalam should amend their petition to say that researchers should distribute their GPL'd code, rather than just GPL'ing their code (when it would be distributed is another matter).
Considering dalke's points, I think the peer review point of stewart and mangalam is pretty weak. The public does not have the expertise, in general, to be considered peer reviewers. Not to say that the code shouldn't be open sourced and openly distributed, but I think peer review is a straw man.
Other than that, it sounds like Dalke might agree. This would be a great benefit to society :), and it would also make researchers more accountable to the public.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
Something created with entirely public funds should become public domain, not licensed under any other terms.
I'm not a GPL basher.. but I don't think the GPL is the place for it.
It should become public domain, with absolutely no restrictions attached to it whatsoever.
If someone wants to continue work and GPL it, great... their version would be GPL.
If someone wants to take it and fold it into a proprietary system, that's great too. Companies pay taxes too, you know.
What Mr. Dalke seems to ignore when he makes the statement against opening source code:
"I countered that the arguments in favor of the petition, like encouraging standardization and supporting incremental improvements, are not as strong as the originators' claim. Because of all these problems I see in the Open Informatics petition, I find that I cannot sign it."
Is that the originator, in this case, is being funded by public money. If I am working for a company to produce a software product, I don't have any rights to that finished product. Similarly, if you are working for the government when you develop something, everyone in the country should gain access to the work. I'm not even saying it should be GPL'd, but released straight into the public domain.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
All of those argueing that since you have given your hard earned dollars to the university system and thus are entitled to your fare share of the results. Well that sounds all well and good but in reality your tax dollars really don't do much besides keep tution low. The collective funds that the tax payer contribute are just a drop in the bucket in terms of what it takes to run a major university system. Unless you want higher taxes I think the Universities should continue to profit from their independent research, its a neccessary evil
yes. there are actual written laws that are copyright.
a building manufacturer had to pay money just to see the text of a law concerning.. manufacturing buildings.
*cough*
he was EXTREMELY upset to see that the actual text of a public law was copyright a private company, so he posted the text of the law on a website, got sued, and lost.
this is a horriffic example of a good system gone bad.
no
Wouldn't that mean that the FBI would have to open all of it's source code to anyone.
It has it's advantages but it also has it's disadvantages if that's the case.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
If the source is closed, patented and commercialized then the government funded agency would require LESS money to operate in the future and be less of a burden to the taxpayers. If the source was given away for free - some other company would simply capitalize on the "free" effort for their own monetary gain anyway.
From the OpenInformatics FAQ:
We are not proposing a specific license; only that whatever license is used provides certain minimal rights to the users of the software:
[1] The Right to View the Source Code: electronic access to the source code, without royalty.
[2] The Right to Redistribution: anyone may redistribute the work.
[3] The Right to Create Derivative Works: anyone may create (and redistribute) a derivative of the work.
[4] The Right of Ownership: the originating author or organization may retain the Copyright for commercial licensing purposes.
This primarily grows from the "open to scrutiny" requirement, although it also goes beyond it a little. [1] places it open to scrutiny, [2] allows wider distribution without burdening the University's bandwidth, [3] allows deeper scrutiny by testing changes in the source code, among other things.
Number [4] on the other hand, allows for researchers, universities, or private sources of partial funding to get the commercial rights. Distribution of source code and the right to run object code are quite separable legally -- although there is a certain practical difficulty in enforcement if a $5,000/seat commercial product can be duplicated by running a free download through gnu c. Just don't call the commercial vendor for support...
So this won't give the University as much immediate financial gain as keeping the source secret might, but it allows some, and a U's two MAIN goals are supposed to be educating students and advancing knowledge; staying solvent is just a means to those ends. Open source (in the generic sense) certainly advances knowledge a lot better than secret source. In the long run, open-sourcing might even speed new developments enough to balance out the reduced payoff per development.
Finally, when the best available starting point for a research project was proprietary code, this arrangement would give the researcher some chance of getting permission to publish the partly-his, partly-theirs code while leaving the ownership with the original proprietor.
You don't have any choice in paying your taxes. Using money forcibly expropriated* by the government for such activities violates the rights of those who earned the money in the first place.
* The governemnt ultimately uses force -- by putting you in jail or shooting at you if you resist -- if you don't pay your taxes.
Intially the issue already seems decided. It would seem that open source is definitely the way to go in all cases. However, I can tell you that there is a prevailing new trend in grants for research. That is, organizations providing grants want to create jobs to improve the economy. Often times, the organizations want to generate jobs in a particular region or city. Look at any grant application. When applying, you often have to justify the potential for commercialization to get the grant. Maintaining control of IP allows a university to license the technology and create jobs in new industries (often through university sponsored incubators). I feel that there should be a balance between open and closed source in universities. -- Jeff
"What, we have to release this to the public! How are we going to charge money for this? Hey, go run this code through the obfuscation department."
And so it goes, -seth
Just becuase it is publicly funded, the tax payer is not entitled to direct dividends of the research. Most times the tax payer enjoys the fruits of these labors indirectly. The government frequently subsidizes many endevors that are apparently not profitable. The inventor/writer/coder may go on to profit from thier work. There is NO expectation on the public's part to have direct access to the work that is publicly funded. We frequently "profit" from this investment in terms of the expansion of scientific knowledge.
Public funding != Public goods
I love the open source socialists (isn't that what OSS stands for? ;). It should definately be free. Universities are just another pathetic excuse for ... (nevermind).
But what about the projects that are 50% private money and 50% public? What about projects that are all public money, but all private facilities and hardware? What about projects where the ideas and supervision come from the private sector?
I don't know of a general rule that covers all these situtations. If one said, "if it has $0.01 of public money, it has to be BSDed or GPLed" I know that there would be significantly less money available and that in turn means less support for graduate students and hence fewer graduate students.
So this is a case by case deal. You don't have to like it. It is just the realities of modern universities that a big chunk of their money comes from non-public sources.
-- Multics
They should have done this for alcohol too! lol.
Dalke's objection seems somewhat narrow. It would be simple to exclude software work which creates derivative works based on existing commercial software packages. Or, the patches could be required to be made publicly available, without compromising the copyright on the original work.
This takes a few paragraphs to become relevant, so stay with me...
Recently, I've been involved with submission of an SBIR (Small Business Inovation Research) proposal, in which the Gov. gives small companies money to do research - the idea being to help create innovation - the big boys (companies over 500? people) are not elligible to get the funding.
Beauty. The interesting part is that companies who get the funding get rights to any patents as a result of the research, with the proviso that the Gov. gets to use the technology royalty free.
And as Lessig has pointed out, patents were also originally intended to help spur innovation, by giving the inventor and incentive to invent.
Also, seems to me like a lot of people end up sitting on patents - they never intend to produce the thing. I'm not sure how much of a wacked out conspiracy theory it is, but I've heard urban legends of the oil companies buying patents/rights to energy saving devices, never intending to make the device. Regardless of the truth, you can see the logic.
Back to the SBIR: So the good part is the Gov. gets rights to the results of the public money. Yea. And the underdog business gets a foot in the door. Yea.
But what if nothing is done with the patent? Or the rights are sold to one of the big boys, for a sort of denial of service attack in the patent world.
I think the patent should be reverted to the public domain (no royalties for anyone) if steps to develop the product/idea have not been taken within 1 year (in addition to the other current patent time restrictions).
Relevancy:
Why not apply the same thing to software? Gov agency's get the code for free, to diminish inter-agency rivalry. And if a private company/person/etc developed the code under a Gov. contract, they get patent style rights to it - a few years of proprietary code, which must eventually be released to the public. And if there is no active development on a commerical product (keep in mind a product aimed at being sold back to the government probably counts), then the time to release into the public domain is even sooner.
Is this software that is developed as the purpose of the grant, i.e. "Develop a software program that does X," or is it software that is developed as a byproduct on the way to accomplishing the research goal?
Yeah, yeah, open source software, that's all well and go.
But I know that my share of the tax money is going to pay for fighter jets, not software. I'd like to take one out for a spin next weekend. They are, after all, purchased with my tax dollars.
So where do I sign up?
I like the idea of publicly funded and availible code, but you can't apply this principle to other publicly funded things like law enforcement or the military.
Our tax dollars paid for lots of Humvee's but i'm sure the military won't let me drive one, or take one apart.
-ted
In many states, the money from the goverment for PBS mostly just keeps the transmitters running. When a PBS station wants to produce original content, they may get a goverment grant, but odds are that it will only cover a fraction of the cost. So, either the producing station applies for grants from corporations or foundations, or the station funds it with its own money (which it is probably hoping to make back in direct sales to schools or consumers, and licensing it for broadcast on other PBS stations.) If PBS were 100% government funded, then it would be possible to give assets away, but since money is always sparse, they feel they have to charge. Also, don't forget that some of the original PBS content isn't even produced by PBS stations, it's produced by private production companies and sold to PBS. Some stations create no content at all.
What your tax money is really paying for is a television signal to almost every home. PBS reaches something like 98% of homes. I believe the other networks are somewhere in the 80%'s and cable is in the 70%'s.
Lockheed Martin is a company that works on government defense contracts. Since the public funds the government and the government pays LM for developing code and what not, does that mean everyone in the U.S. should have access to the code Lockheed Martin writes for a defense contract? Duh. Some of you people get a little out of hand with this open source stuff.
No license out is good enough for this, software produced by governemt or publicly funded sites should be:
1) available as public domain to the people who paid for it(citizens that funded it through taxes)
2) only legally available to those people, this software was not free, but paid for out of the citizens pockets. Only the citizens should have the right to descide the fate of the software.
3) not be used by a commercial opperation UNLESS any adaptations or enhancements are released is the same manner as the original code. as in Microsoft could use the code in windows BUT would have to release the software back to the people freely, openly.
i pay for a good deal of things here in the US, i beleive that what i pay for in Taxes, i should have available to me. I pay for roads so i can drive on those roads, so that the roads can bring services to me etc. i pay for my government so my government can provide safety for me. No one can stop me from the things i pay for in taxes except myself, this should be the same for software that my taxes pay for.
I dont think that this should just be for the US, people of Denmark pay much taxes, more than i do. So they should also have a right to software that they pay for, also, i should not inherit the right to that software unless the danes wish me to.
Keep in mind that, e.g., a biology or computer science professor or graduate student who is paid with public funds could probably get paid much more in the private sector. In effect the person is "donating" or "self-funding" part of their salary. The sacrifice can actually be measured, and it is in the tens of thousands of dollars US.
These people are giving up money in exchange for something else: academic freedom, prestige, geography, and other things. One thing they have gotten in exchange in the past is at least partial ownership in intellectual property. For example, a professor who writes a textbook owns the copyright on the textbook -- the school does not. The professor can sell the book and keep the profits.
In short, historically the products of academia have been funded in part by academics, in part by government, and in part by academic institutions, and these parties have shared ownership in those products.
This proposal would clearly upset a status quo that has existed long before Bayh-Dole ever was enacted. So things aren't so simple.
One thing I object to in the current system is schools that PREVENT academics from releasing open-source software. In my opinion, writing software is like writing a book, and should be treated the same way -- the academic author should have control on the distribution, not the school, and definitely not the government.
Would this mean that all the source for software the NSA and CIA have been using would be made public?
:-)
Now that would be something I'd like to see...
The author(s) should definitely be acknowledged for their work and the code should definitely be open. If it was paid for by the tax payers, it belongs to the tax payers. It is only fair to acknowledge the work of individuals irregardless of who the rights holders are.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
I say go for it. The govt organization I work for doesn't give a rat's ass about "intellectual property" about any software we write. You're welcome to it but it's pretty boring stuff, mostly just accounting and records management stuff. You'll probably be thinking that since it was written in-house by a govt org, that it must be really crappy code, but you'll be pleasantly surprised at how tight and efficient it is because I think we're the last US govt org in existance that still cares about the quality of work we produce. You won't find any slip-shod security holes either, because our network and systems admin considers himself to be the "Klingon Warrior" of network security and rules with an iron fist. You'll only find a few M$ apps too, we're primarily a Unix shop... and yes that includes Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD too.
This is only an ambiguous issue to people who think Microsoft EULAs are handed down from God.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
The question is a real nobrainer to answer.
If there is an issue of which license to use, thenit should be such a license that in the public paid for state it is usable in both GPL
and proprietary manners. But the code sate as paid for by the public remains public in that state.
Should it be altered and the GPL applied to the altered state, then the altered state onward is under the GPL. But should it be altered under proprietary control, then that version/fork remains proprietary so long as the holder of the alterations wants it to be.
Public spending so to benefit both individuals and business, for both of these things are want makes up the society for which public money (taxes) is collected and used.
It really is a no brainer for anyone but those looking for a free ride.
Not that i want the product of the research(such as this fusion reactor) but i want the abiility to enjoy free access and benefit from it. If someone develops this reactor and then sells me the electricity, i have a problem with that UNLESS i have the option of building my own. If someone builds the reactor and GIVES me the electricity(or my payments are simply cost recovery)then i have seen direct benefit from what i paid for.
Also, in another post i made, i refered to my ability to use the roads i pay for in my taxes, That is FREE use of the roads, i could also build me own roads if i wanted, using all the modern technology my pocketbook could handle. FREE use, direct benefit for taxpayers.
This argument is accurate because i paid(in taxes)these people to design this idea, NOT to build a market ready version, they would have every right to build a commercial version, but i shoudl have that right as well.
http://www.nyfairuse.org/law_is_copyrighted.xhtml1 b.asp
http://www.thompsonhine.com/news/nl/ebus_march200
Not too long ago we had another story on these lines and I posted my opinion. When I reached the first argument raised by dalke against public code my repost was straight to fingers so here I am.
Prove it! Especially from a public funded university venture! As always money can buy money (advertising buys income) but generating real revenue from software is extremely tricky (.bomb). If he specified an exact license and copy-protection scheme he may have had an argument, but only if his product has a unique quality that is quite globally beneficial within a field. In case I need explain my argument here, he should have tried to get away with I want to experiment with a modification to the algorithm used for working with databases of the secondary structure of proteins (if thats what it is, he never said) and DSSP is the only database/tool used then he could have an argument, but ONLY if you accept that non-free Open Source is as good as Free software. Yep, it most certainly does! The result of the work would be a public built and understood system (however long it takes) which can be used by anyone, anywhere and they can offer their work back into it. Take his Secondary Proteins. Could the algorithm not be examined as an entity instead of as a piece of DSSP? Could you not objectify it out? Could that work be used by others to start building a free replacement? Could he just have written it for a hypothetical system and ported out the information he needed to fill the gaps from DSSP for any demo/testing (as the first Free compiler must have been compiled by a non-free compiler unless they were madThis is the nub of the argument, I say that public money should not be used to buy private money but used to fund the social purpose of learning, dalke says if it could make money it should be allowed. This is a truly american atitude (not to say it does not exist elsewhere, but it is an american creation) in that while most other societies would have seen the choice as public or private, now a choice for surrupticiously funding your economy by subsidising private ventures is quite acceptable, why? Allowing the university to sell itself is fine, but allowing it to fund what it sells with public money AND stop people from distributing it serves purely capitalistic purposes and not the greater good (and if you want to believe that capitalism is more important than greater good thats your bag not mine).
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Easy...point out that Amazon save like 17 million on open source software
good luck...I would vote for you even though you are a Democrat!^^
The University cannot *itself* make a competing product under BSD, since someone will make a cheaper product.
GPL? Well, they have the option of making their own commercial package, but if another company wants to compete, they PAY.
Also BSD would have killed Kerberos.
The primary reason for this was to allow the researchers a chance to examine the data, write reports and so forth, essentially, get a return on the huge investment in time and resources each institution has to make to "buy" time on telescopes. Essentially, it keeps the motivation for those researchers. Importantly, as the data IS publicly funded, it does find its way into the public domain, as it should.
Perhaps a similar approach could be used here?
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
My taxes help to pay for the county jail...I want a key to every cell!
How insane is that? Of course there are exceptions, both ways, but it's absurd to say that *all* publically funded code should be open-source to the public.
How about public domain, its the only thing thats really free anymore.
Even ``morphological'' studies are no longer done with magnifying glasses and film, but rather with large collections of digital images from spacecraft such as SOHO and TRACE. Image calibration and reduction software is mandatory if one is to do meaningful experimental analysis.
Fortunately, the solar community has by-and-large been good about releasing analysis tools into the public domain -- in fact, there's a homebrew distribution system that grew up, mostly before CVS, to nearly-universal status within the research community. Without the tools that are available via solarsoft, I literally could not do the work that I do without developing similar things myself (in fact, I do develop tools myself, and publish them... but that's another story)
Even within the relatively open solar community, there are software-based barriers to entry. For example, most of the current community develops in a proprietary language called IDL, which was developed in significant part (in its early years) with public funds. The developer, David Stern, started RSI, inc. to capitalize on his language. Currently, IDL licenses start at $1,000 per year, double the current cost of an entry-level workstation.
When workstations cost $10,000 and only large organizations could afford hardware capable of doing image processing, this cost was excusable. But now, in an era of cheap computers, high connectivity, and readily available space-borne solar data, the cost of supporting IDL is the main barrier preventing hobbyists, high school students, and interested amateurs from doing their own research programs. If IDL were open-source and free, RSI might well still exist (under the Cygnus / Red-Hat business model), and solar (and other) research would be much more accessible to the masses.
One may argue that IDL (and its competing product, MatLab) wouldn't have developed into the large, powerful packages that they are without commercialization. But such arguments are spurious: PDL, the Perl Data Language, is entirely open-source and free, and powerful enough that that I am now devloping tools in it instead of in IDL.
I signed the petition, and I encourage you to, too. Publicly funded intellectual property is your property, just as the national forests are your forests. Demand them.
The better question is, should public funds be used to finance research to be used by a private company?
The answer to that is absolutely not. Remember though, that a lot of publicly funded research is related to the Department of Defense. Making code that may eventually become part of a classified system GPL'd is obviously a bad idea.
It is odd though, because if I write software, then the copyright is owned by my employer. Since we, the taxpayers, are the employers of public researchers, the copyright for their work should belong to the taxpayers.
So, I guess all results of publicly funded research should be copyrighted in the public domain.
Of course, what is then the incentive for an individual to pursue research at all?
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
True, and this is why it is so important to publish the code. It really doesn't help you anything if the math is correct but the implementation of it is flawed. And even less if the math is correct when dealing with usual arithmetic, but wrong when you're dealing with the almost always approximate answers you get from a computer due to the discrete nature of computer arithmetics.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Isn't everyone else getting a bit tired of this debate? We all know what the GPL is, we all know what the BSD license is... they each have their own set of problems. Since we are all fully aware of each license's quirks why don't we just drop it once and for all?
Good grief...
where's the motivation?
... but there may be need to be a period of proprietary-ness to keep some of the high-rollers in the game.
would the potential loss that section of the task force be worth the open-ness of it.
in the end, i guess im just trying to say that enforcing this at all costs is a bit extremist. in the end though, i think the software should be released
-brady
I think those points are good enough for me to subscribe to, I wasn't commenting on OpenInformatics in particular, but science in more general terms.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
You pay taxes to the government for the service that it provides - basically, keeping the society, the economy and the infrastructure in a working order. Purchasing software, for their benefit, is a mechanism that helps them provide their services to you.
Just because you are a tax payer does not entitle you to the products that the government purchases. The government also pays for nukes, but saying "I paid for it, I want one" is silly. Likewise, if you were to go into any government office and raid the office supplies, you would be arrested for theft. From their perspective, you have no ownership rights with regards to what they do with their money.
To follow your candy bar analogy, you are entitled to buy a candy bar and eat it. Hershey, however, has no obligation to give you their recipe for chocolate and the schematics for the manufacturing plants so you can duplicate what they are doing.
"Microsoft has made computing accessible to a population who would otherwise not be able to use computers" - B. Kernigha
The original author is NOT required to follow GPL.
But if he claims to release the program under the GPL, he must release the GPL copies with source code as defined by the GPL. I understand that this says nothing about the non-GPL copies, but it's impossible to release a program under the GPL without providing one GPL copy.
The key word here is "release." You can't claim to have released open source software until you have transferred at least one copy to a third party.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Even if tax-funded software research is released to a BSD or GPL license, how fair is it that such products can be used by people who never paid taxes on it, thus saving themselves a bundle in basic research costs?
I am, of course, talking about people outside the country (ie., them crafty furriners). If a company in Slovakistan can reap the benefits of our research, turn around and create a product, then how are we compensated for it? In effect, we pay twice: once for the research, once for the product.
Something to think about, at least.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
But I'll bite.
Yes, if I paid a bunch of researchers to invent and build a (real physical) fusion reactor for me, I'd consider it mine. If I just invested in creating a design, and they come up with a design, I'd want it, blueprints and all.
That's at least how I'd consider it if I was a business funding a research project. But if the employer is "the public" I guess it's alright for the employees to keep the research to themselves and try to make a buck of it.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Putting something under the GPL does not negate any of the original copyright holder's rights. That is why, for example, a copyright holder can place a work under the GPL, and then sell that work to a commerical company under a closed-source license.
I understand multi-licensing. However, a copyright holder can't claim to have released a work under GNU GPL unless there is at least one copy distributed under the GPL. Your "paper tape under the Eiffel Tower" is a Section 10 alternative license scheme in addition to an open source license. Once one other person has a copy of the source code under the GPL, it's free software.
The difference between our views seems to spring from a misunderstanding of the term "putting something under the GPL." I believe that applying the GPL to a piece of software requires that at least one copy be distributed under the GPL.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Many of the objections I've read in the comments so far are along these lines:
1) It's OK to require source-release for some software, but not for the software used to do sensitive seekrit military / spy things
or
2) A lot of government-related software is only partly or ambiguously publically funded -- a project that's primarily private shouldn't have to expose all its secrets.
or
3) The GPL (and some other licenses) are horrible because they place restrictions on future use.
One thing that seems to make sense to me on all three of these things is that in the case of required source release (for instance, if a state or federal agency requires it of all in-house-developed software), the rules could specify a time by which the source must be public, rather than saying it must be immediately open.
To each one, though --
1) Nope. Public funds should mean public disclosure. If data is secret, that's one thing, but the software that operates on the data, that's another. There is no unlimted right for the government to use spy software, especiallly on its own citizens. In the US at least, precisely the opposite is supposed to be true.
2) With exceptions, "Too bad." Accepting government money is a deal with the devil on several levels; if they take the money (even a smidgeon), they should have to follow rules designed specifically and well to benefit their new patrons (the public). So don't take government (public) money if you don't like the rules. Excellent.
3) Public domain does seem to be the most universal option here, though the BSD license would be smart, too.
Combining a time-delay (6 months? 18 months? 36 months?) with point #3 there I think leaves little excuse to companies who say it would "rob them of intellectual property." If your public-funded code of (again, arbitrary) 18 months ago can't be released without jeopardizing your current work, are you using the public's money well, or just resting?
Another point -- rather than thinking of it as "requiring the release of source code" (which sounds burdensome on the producers, and in fact, could be, if they're not set up to do that), think of it as "requiring full disclosure." If your state Office of Budget and Management (or fill in your favorite bureaucracy) spent millions of dollars on faulty software, how would you know? You might wait for the right branch of the right legislature to convene an investigation, hire consultants, hope neither investigators nor consultants are bribed or otherwise tainted, and a few years down the road, the bad code might become part of the public record anyhow. If code is public by law, there's at least potentially a much more direct accountability to the public by the people who wrote the code as well as those who hired them to do it. Is it a potential burden? Sure -- but it's one that we should demand of anyone spending public funds.
Anyhow, them's my thoughts of the moment --
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
"Creates jobs" implies that jobs wouldn't exist without someone owning something.
That's simply not true, although it is fundamental to the capitalist faith.
umm... Proof please?
Can you give an example situation where it would benefit a person to work if he could not own the fruits of that labor?
0 1 - just my two bits
You imply that it's possible to create something without someone owning it. In the end, everything is owned by somebody. Whether it be an individual, a corporation, or a state, everything belongs to someone.
Owning something implies that the party exercises exclusive control over that something. When EVERYBODY owns something (public domain), does it really fcsking matter anymore?
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
You decided to recycle the reason for having patents and copyrights to apply to this argument. There's a reason for that argument, which you seemed to miss, and that is to allow Authors and Inventors to recoup thier time and money creating said Art, thus to encourage artists and inventors to SHARE thier discoveries.
In OUR scenerio, where the PUBLIC FUNDS our Artist/Inventor. There is nothing to recoup. Or, atleast the original funder isn't recouped (you and me)...
Whether funded by the US Government, Bayer, Sony, or Mama Cass, the innovations belong to the individuals who discover/develop them. If the innovators want to license their developments to other corporations, that's their decision.
This is true... What we're advocating is that the US Government should be limited to give funding to individuals who will not retain the intellectual rights, but rather release it into the public domain. This is perfectly normal, legal, constitutional, and WAS very much common practice before the Bayh-Dole Act.
Lastly, Think about the implications of publicly funded technology ending up in the public domain. This means it commercialized and expanded on by ANY company, which from what I understand creates COMPETITION, which I also understand is a KEY mechanism in a prosperous capitalistic society?
You need to relearn your capitalism...
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
I really like where you went with your argument. I agree and think the example of the mapmaker is a good analogy to software development.
It's this time of discussion that can really lead to some good progress in this area. I would like to see the source code to software available as well, such that I can fix it myself if needed and so forth.
You do bring up the GPL but while it does fulfill one of these purposes, it does not fulfill the larger goal of copyright. That is, it does not protect the producer of the software, not without combining it with dual licensing which kind of defeats the purpose of such a discussion.
What I'd like to see is software distributed in a fashion that if I buy a copy I can obtain the source code. I find that very appealing and very useful.
However, to protect the creator of the software there must still be limitations. But I envision those limitations as being similar to other copyrighted works today, like books, maps, pictures, etc. You cannot redistribute the software to others who have not bought it. You may transfer the license that you bought, but you cannot retain a copy when you do so. You must buy a copy for each person who will be using the software. etc.
I also believe the length of time a copyright lasts needs to be altered. It is too long today, well beyond what one would call a limited time.
Useful change to copyright can be accomplished without completely abandoning it and the purposes it should serve.
"As GPL opponents so often point out, though, the GPL also restricts your actions, in that you can't hide your improvements (unless you keep them completely to yourself)."
I don't believe that is the most damaging clause of the GPL, but rather the one that states that you may freely redistribute the software. That's the anti-business clause of the GPL.
I agree that when software developed with public funding is published, it should be done under an open license. However, just because software is developed does not mean that it should be published. That makes the whole proposition totally unreasonable.
Should every shell script and and batch file jotted out in five minutes be documented and published? That seems like an aweful waste of time to me. And even more importantly, requiring publication of source would prevent research from being done. It's often crucial that researchers use and modify the source to an existing commercial package. If no open alternative exists, research teams often do not have the skills or resources to duplicate the functionality of even a moderately sized piece of commercial software. In those cases, the researchers are prohibited from publishing their software, as they should be... because it isn't really theirs. They can still do excellent research, though... and should be allowed to.
Open Informatics should aim to prevent publicly funded researchers from caching in on their research by grantic exclusive licenses to private corporations. Open Informatics should NOT aim to strongarm researchers into using ONLY open software, or into releasing software that isn't useful or suitable for public consumption. For those reasons, I believe that the petition should be worded not to require publication of software, but to require that it have an open license IF it is published.
Mike Lococo
"Public" as a category of property does not exist. Property can be owned, or unclaimed.
"Tax" is an euphemism, semantically a perfect subset of "theft". The money taken remains owned by those from whom it was stolen. Unfortunately when it's mixed into the undifferentiated tax take, partially spent etc, there's no traceable ownership chain. Therefore all "public" property is unclaimed, free-for-all, finders keepers.
To anybody who lives off tax funds, shame on you, thief! Get a real job!
If one were to grant the concept of copyright, one could say that the software made by programmers taking tax funds belonged to the coder personally, since whatever contract they made was with a null entity for unclaimed funds. However I don't grant that concept - software is not physical, therefore it is merely an unownable pattern in an ownable medium. The medium itself being tax funded, is of course unclaimed and may be legitimately taken by anyone.
Nice try, but you'd better research your own "stupid analogies" first.
In order to do commercial filming on NPS property, you must get a permit from the Park Superintendent. You will spell out, in detail, what you want to do, where and when. Then you will be escorted (and pay for the privilege) by uniformed NPS personnel. The payment part was added recently, because advertising agencies (especially ones for car companies) were using National Parks as a cheap and easy backdrops.
The same goes for scientific research- in order to place instruments or enter closed areas, you must get a permit, which for individuals requires you to submit a report on your findings. If you need physical samples, you also need to get a collecting permit, again detailing what, where and when you intend to collect, and where the specimines will go when you are finished with them (hint-- you don't get to keep them.)
But until you finish your research, all your notes and preliminary results are yours, and you do not have to tell anyone about them, even if your conclusions are being used to set NPS policy. When your research ends is your decisioin. I know of projects that have been going on for over thirty years, and one that only "ended" when the researcher died, years after his retirement.
Excellent point and one that I should have made.
You do bring up the GPL but while it does fulfill one of these purposes, it does not fulfill the larger goal of copyright. That is, it does not protect the producer of the software, not without combining it with dual licensing which kind of defeats the purpose of such a discussion.
Ah, but the larger goal of copyright is to place works in the public domain. The copyright clause has an purpose and a means. The purpose is to "promote progress" and the means is by protecting the economic interests of software producers. Good copyright laws can do both. Right now we don't have very good copyright laws.
What I'd like to see is software distributed in a fashion that if I buy a copy I can obtain the source code. I find that very appealing and very useful.
That provision alone would probably solve most of the problems with software copyright law.
Plus, it would create enormous benefits, especially among young people. If you're a kid who has a Windows computer and a handful of games, about all you can do with the computer and software is play with it, and you don't learn anything. On the other hand, if all software came with complete, buildable source code, those same kids would get tired of just playing the games, and they would start exploring the source code to make the software do what they wanted it to do.
After all, what better way for a young geek to show off to his friends then to hack up their favorite game!
In about five years, we'd have an entire new generation of kids who learned to program, starting as young teenagers, by studying all of the best, state-of-the-art software in the world. We would see an explosion in computer literacy and blossoming of programming talent that is hard to even imagine. Contrast this with the current situation where it is nearly impossible to buy and install a piece of software without clicking a button that says that you agree that you will never read the software, "reverse-engineer" being a fancy term for "read".
However, to protect the creator of the software there must still be limitations. But I envision those limitations as being similar to other copyrighted works today, like books, maps, pictures, etc. You cannot redistribute the software to others who have not bought it.
This is already the law with respect to all copyrighted works, including computer programs.
You may transfer the license that you bought, but you cannot retain a copy when you do so.
Better yet, forbid any licenses on mass-market software at all as a condition of copyright. Copyright was designed to replace private licensing of works. In reality, most people simply ignore all of the insane "licensing agreements" included with software anyhow and use software according to common sense -- you buy the software, and you use it. You only get rid of your store-bought copy after you stop using the software.
If a software company chose to reject copyright protection in favor of a licensing contract -- say they feel that they require the authority to enter your home and search your computers -- then they would have to enter into a trade-secret arrangement with all of their customers, and would do so at the risk of their code leaking out, where it would enter the public domain with no copyright protection. This would strongly deter software licensing, except in cases where it is really economically necessary.
Even better, how about just sticking with existing copyright law, which says that you may transfer the copy that you bought, but you cannot retain a copy when you do so.
You must buy a copy for each person who will be using the software. etc.
or, more simply, you must buy a copy in order to use the software. Should a family with five kids have to buy five copies of the same software, one for each child? The idea of "one copy per user is an artifact of the "personal license" model, which is the model I'd like to eliminate. The correct model for copyright is "Physical copies as chattel" If you own a book, you have the right to read it, regardless of whether you bought the book from the publisher, borrowed it from the library, or bought it on eBay. Software should be no different.
Copyright law was designed to deal with the reproduction and distribution of physical copies. It ties rights to those copies. Most software is packaged on distribution CDs, so the physical-copy copyright model remains valid and functional.
Useful change to copyright can be accomplished without completely abandoning it and the purposes it should serve.
Agreed. I'd go so far as to say that useful change to copyright can best be accomplished by returning to the purposes that it was designed to serve.
I have some pictures I took of the Grand Canyon. Would you like to buy them? I own the copyright on them. They are for sale. They are pictures I took on public land. I can't sell the land, but I can sell intellectual property I derived from the land.
:)
This is really all I meant to imply. I bow to your clearly superior knowledge of commercial filming and scientific research on National Park Service property. I likely should have simply stopped after " - the analogy doesn't hold."
The articles are not talking about simply the results of publicly funded research. I agree that the results of publicly funded research, be they new drugs, funky mathematical algorithms, etc should be released into the public domain. Not copyrighted. The public at large funded the research and so the public should have access to the results to do with as they will. This includes selling stuff based on the research, and doesn't exclude the team that created it.
But that's not what the articles were getting at. They were talking about the tools used internally to get those results. A lot of those tools are proprietary though some have the good old "free for private or non-commercial use" clause in them. It also covers modifications to those bits of software that are kept purely internal.
There is nothing wrong with that, since these are merely tools used to make getting the research results easier. What you're paying for is not a little tweak to the tools your research team have made, but the actual deliverable which is the purpose of the research.
I operate exactly the same way in the real commercial world. When I do a gig for a client, they get the deliverables. A configured system, doco, maybe a specific program. They don't get copies of all my funky helper scripts that I use to get the job done. They don't get a copy of my .muttrc file because I sent project related email. They don't get my perl script that automatically uploads the newest versions of config files via ssh. That's not what they've paid me for.
So at the end of the day, making all tools used by publicly funded research GPL is not what people really mean. What they really mean is to have the results of publicly funded research be made public.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT after you.
I think you need to reconsider the original intent of the copyright clause in the Constitution. To do this, first consider why the Constitution was created. A lot of political turmoil happened around the time of the U.S. Revolution. What are now called Americans believed that their /rights/ as citizens were being violated; they were not (directly) represented in Parliament. Numerous state constitutions had developed before this time, guaranteeing individuals certain liberties.
When the United States split from England, a document was created. This document was the Constitution. The document starts off with "We the people" for an important reason: this document was created by the people to _secure the rights of the people_. The Constitution is an implementation document: it defines how individual liberties are secured by and protected from government.
That is, the U.S. Constitution is a document describing how peoples' rights should be protected.
The framers of the Constitution understood at the time that artists (I am using this word broadly to mean creators of an intellectual work, including scientists) needed to be protected, that is, they needed to be able to be compensated for their work. To do this, the Constitution has a clause granting these artists control over their work.
You argue that modern implementation of copyright law contradicts the spirit of the Constitution. What is the spirit of the Constitution? To protect the individual!
Would programmers' software be pirated more or less if every program were open source (but still sold commercially)?
MORE! The existence of warez to the level it is today would indicate to any observer that a huge number of people are willing to steal this software. Open-sourcing everything would increase piracy.
If more people are pirating the software, **how are the authors' rights being protected**?
They are NOT being protected in this situation. The spirit of the Constitution is to protect and secure the rights of individuals.
The framers do recognize that it is important for the public to be able to benefit from these works, but not at the expense of the individual! The framers understand that art requires that artists be compensated for their work or they will (may) not produce. Hence, they protect the artists.
The Constitution protects the rights of the individual first and foremost. The rights of a programmer, in the Constitution's spirit, are top of the list. His rights to make money from his software are above the rights of the public to benefit from the information available in his source.
Your analogy of novels and source code is just that: analogy. Argument by analogy is a logical fallacy. Although they are similar situations, they are not identical. Of course it would be easier for the public to benefit from existing source code, but via warez this would be at expense of the authors.
The community at expense of the individual? One word: communism.
Note that my argument is not that copyright law as implemented today is necessarily in the spirit of the Constitution, but only that the rights of an artist are (and rightly should be) placed above those who desire to benefit from his work.
Sorry about my previous comment. THis one should be formatted better. I think you need to reconsider the original intent of the copyright clause in the Constitution.
/rights/ as citizens were being violated; they were not (directly) represented in Parliament. Numerous state constitutions had developed before this time, guaranteeing individuals certain liberties.
To do this, first consider why the Constitution was created. A lot of political turmoil happened around the time of the revolution. What are now called Americans believed that their
When the United States split from England, a document was created. This document was the Constitution. The document starts off with "We the people" for an important reason: this document was created by the people to _secure the rights of the people_. The Constitution is an implementation document: it defines how individual liberties are secured by and protected from government.
That is, the U.S. Constitution is a document describing how peoples' rights should be protected.
The framers of the Constitution understood at the time that artists (I am using this word broadly to mean creators of an intellectual work, including scientists) needed to be protected, that is, they needed to be able to be compensated for their work. To do this, the Constitution has a clause granting these artists control over their work.
You argue that modern implementation of copyright law contradicts the spirit of the Constitution. What is the spirit of the Constitution? To protect the individual!
Would programmers' software be pirated more or less if every program were open source (but still sold commercially)?
MORE! The existence of warez to the level it is today would indicate to any observer that a huge number of people are willing to steal this software.
If more people are pirating the software, **how are the authors' rights being protected**?
They are NOT being protected in this situation. The spirit of the Constitution is to protect and secure the rights of individuals.
The framers do recognize that it is important for the public to be able to benefit from these works, but not at the expense of the individual!
The Constitution protects the rights of the individual first and foremost. The rights of a programmer, in the Constitution's spirit, are top of the list. His rights to make money from his software are above the rights of the public to benefit from the information available in his source.
This is a rather complex issue because there are many people who are "paying" to create software at Universities...(1) The students pay, as some of their tuition money must go to software development at the university (2) Businesses pay, as they often donate money to such projects (3) The public pays, as our tax dollars go to university grants (4) The researchers "pay" by putting in large amounts of time. Now, that I've said "who pays", let me try to classify in what order (that is, who pays the most in the typical situation):
1st: I believe it's clear that the researchers contribute the most to these projects, as they put in their own time.
2nd: I believe after the researchers, businesses contribute the most.
3rd/4th: After businesses, clearly the university students (NOT the university) who pay the most. In many universities, the yearly tuition comes up to 20,000+ dollars a year. Multiply that by thousands of students.
4th/3rd: After students, I think the public contributes the remainder. Note, the public may contribute *more* than students, because the public contributes to many student grants, not to mention putting the students through high school.
So, now I've identified the orders of interests. So what does that mean? What should each party get for his/her/their interest in it? How can we do this while satisfying the interests of all parties?
To satisfy the researchers interest -- the researcher should be able to publish the code under a non-free license for a limited time: just enough time to allow him to make a reasonable profit considering his/her efforts (pehaps 1 or 2 years). However, he should not be able to choose the license at his will, and certainly shouldn't have the EULA option. Researchers should only be able to publish under the least restrictive license which still gives them the possibility of profit. Some critical parts of the program should be public-domain from the start, so they can be reviewed. As for the rest of the license, it should be something which does not prohibit reverse-engineering, nor does it take away end-users rights to modify it on their system, or to distribute modifications: a license like the one Quake is released under, which is very liberal.
To satisfy the business' interest (for the businesses w/c contributed to the project), they should have full access to free use of the program, as well as source code. Additionally, 1-2 years after the initial release, businesses should have the right to make modifications and sell such under the license of their choice. Should the original investor choose to release under a license like the GPL, the business would be granted an excpetion, and would be able to treat it as if a BSD license.
To satisfy the students interest. Students should get free use of the program, as well as access to the source code, so they can make any modifications they want. They get the same deal businesses get, minus the option to modify and sell 1-2 years after the initial release. Furthermore, before 1-2 years, they should have the right to release source-code additions (but not modifications). If they make modifications, they should have to release them as binaries...they may release the source code for their modifications after the "inventors" 1-2 year license expires.
To satisfy the public's interest. Of course, the government has full access to the software, free of charge. After the 1-2 year profit-making deal given the original inventor, the work falls into public domain. Should the businesses have made modifications on that original work and sold them, the modified parts are not affected, but the non-modified parts must be public-domained.
The ultimate payback the public gets for supporting inventors little projects is to have public-domain access. The more involved the public (i.e., citizen taxdollars) are, the quicker that should come. In the case of typical software, where the public does not "donate" but does support it by paying to enforce draconian IP laws (w/c, btw, should be scaled back), the public doesn't get access soon enough [20 years for patents, life + 70 and (probably eternity, if they keep on extending it) for copyrights). For things where the public is only involved in that it protects IP, it should get public-domain access in at least 10 years.
Note, this also applies for GPLed and BSDed (free) software. The public pays to support GPLed and BSDed software by enforcing the terms of those contracts. Thus, after 10 years, the original work that was GPLed (but not the modifications) needs to fall into the public domain. The modifications should fall into public domain 10 years after their publication.
Personally, I like GPL and BSD better than public domain. But as the public does pay for GPL/BSD licenses by enforcing the terms of their contracts, even things covered under them should -- by logic -- eventually have to fall under the public domain.
Remember, an ideal world is a world where there is no intellectual property at all. GPL and BSD licenses are just a way help liberate information in a world where there is intellectual property.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
pdl.perl.org
Research based on proprietary technology would have to be rebuild-- the wheel would be re-invented costing the public far more in the short run.
I think that where possible the works should be open source (ideally something like the BSD license, but the GPL is better than selling it to a company...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I think you need to reconsider the original intent of the copyright clause in the Constitution.
No you don't, the intent is explicitly mentioned!
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"
Don't go try looking for other reasons, such as protecting the artists, because you are merely contradicting the explicitly stated intent here.
Promoting Science and Useful Arts is not done by secretly holding code, but by publicising the source for others to learn from so that new ideas emerge, and Science and Useful arts progress.
As your claim's basis is in direct contradiction with explicit content from the constitution, your entire post is rendered invalid.
The point which you glossed over is that although information (photographs, code, schematics, CAD drawings for a Ferrari) costs virtually nothing to transfer/store, the resources to initially create this information ARE scare. Even if all the programmers, engineers, and musicians of the world were willing to work for free, there would still be a scarcity because there is a finite number of these people, and the work takes time.
As you point out, some day the cost of "copying" any tangible object, even a space shuttle, will be virtually insignificant. Who will design all these products that cost nothing to produce? Presumably, there won't be much point in paying anyone, since everything (except living space, I suppose) will be free. Would talented people just do it for fun/prestige? The OSS movement has demonstrated that it works, at least within the scope of software development. However, I don't think a ccouple o guys with a HandyCam could film the next Titanic.
If you have faith in your vision, then you should have no problem with allowing the creators of "intellectual property" to set their own price for the information they produce. When the MARKET decides that their effort is no longer worth paying for, these people will disappear (as is clearly the trend for the RIAA).
Everything happens in cycles. If the software industry, the RIAA, and Hollywood are unable to adapt, they will be wiped out and the production of high-budget information will practically cease. In time however, the demand for such material will inevitably find some way to provide for these industries again.
Unfortunately you take the quote out of context.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Taken out of context it would appear to mean that. Remmeber that this is a document designed to protect the people of the United States. Of course protection must be given to science in general (for the benefit of the public), and in order to do this it grants individuals further rights.
When referring to what the "spirit" of this argument is, one must consider the ENTIRE context. The entire context makes it clear that this document's point is to secure liberaties of the individual. Perhaps a more clear way to put it would be: "Because we want to secure science and art, we grant another individual liberty."
Favoring the rights of the public over the rights of the individual sounds like communism, not something the United States has ever embraced as an idea.
One of the few really good arguments for the GPL is, in my opinion, that it counters the trends of universities selling their works to major corporations. Although I am generally in favor of both the GPL and BSD-style licenses, this is one area where the GPL is stronger. For example, if Linux was not licensed under the GPL, would some of the modifications have been sold to corporations for profit, probably patented? We may never know, but given the trends in biotechnology research in universities, it is food for thought.
(I am NOT against the BSD license-- actually, one can see how BSD licenses can be used to comjoditize the market to the point where proprietary products cannot compete-- see Apache as such a product, but that is irrelevent here.)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Sorry, but you're just plain wrong. At least in the US, whoever paid for the work owns the IP. If you develop an invention on company time, guess who gets to own & license the patent? Hint: it isn't you. I work for one company on a contract with a second company to develop software for them. Guess who owns and licenses the code? Hint: it isn't me, and it isn't my company.
The same principle applies to government research. The government paid for the work, so the government owns the IP. The government can choose to release the IP to the public, or it can cede it to the institution who developed it. But either way, it's the government's decision because they have the right to own the IP because they paid for it.
We're not talking about the government forcing private owners of IP to release it to the public. We're talking about getting the government to release the IP that *it* owns as a result of spending public funds.
There is no individual right concerned in this issue at all, except the right to replicate others' work. This right is taken away by this copyright law, in order to progress science and arts - so you see the US constitution does embrace the stance of progressing science and arts over individual rights.
As for the "right" to secretly hold your creation, this issue was addressed well by the root of the thread. Either you copyright your idea (and disclose its details), or you do not get to copyright it. This is exactly what copyright is all about.
Also there is no more 'inherent' piracy if you distribute sources and not binaries, you're merely enabling the buyers of software to learn from it, and thus promote science and arts.
I don't really see what is your point with the analogy to communism. If the constitution was about the rights of the individual only, in such a narrow perspective, it would define anarchy.
Actually, I was thinking about an idea like this just a few weeks ago. Most government documents are distributed electronically as PDF files (in addition to physical distribution). The latest version of Acrobat includes JavaScript functionality (IIRC), and I know it has some basic math functionality. It seems to me that tax forms would be prime candidates for inclusion of formulae and functions; if not the full IRS 1040A, then at least the 1040 EZ, and perhaps some of the other simpler schedules. Such a system could aid everybody--taxpayers and the IRS, who would not need to spend so much time checking for errors (I know they do it, last year they caught an error on my taxes that resulted in a $200+ refund).
Actually, I wish they would make more of their forms a little bit more functional. All of the forms I've seen appear to be simply scans of the paper copies. Acrobat provides for the ability to create fields, which can be filled out on the form, so that it may be printed out complete, instead of having to print it out, then put it in a typewriter and fill it out. For example, I work for the aviation department of a major university. FAA Form 8710 is the application for a pilot certificate. That form is distributed electronically, in PDF form; it can be downloaded and printed out, but only in the blank form. Several months ago, I created for our use a copy of that form with proper fields, so that the form may be filled out before printing, then printed out complete. This has saved our secretary significant effort--she no longer has to worry about the typewriter, lining things up, etc. I estimate that, over the course of the past six months, and three hundred or so applications, she has probably saved a dozen or more hours of unnecessary work; I "finished" the PDF in approximately six hours; that may seem high, but there are approximately 150 fields on that form, of various types, and it was my first time using Acrobat. Somebody competent could probably have done it in an hour. Also remember that the government has a mandate to reduce the onerous burden of such paperwork: the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995.
Anyhow, it seems to me that most of the government forms distributed as PDF's are not even remotely taking advantage of the capabilities of the Portable Document Format, and that, on tax forms in particular, the government is falling behind the power curve in complying with the Paperwork Reduction Act, as well as good form. Just a suggestion, guys.
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; - US Constitution article I, section 8, clause 8"
he claims that this is a clear statement that a public good - the progress of science - can be acheived by keeping writings (in this case: code) exclusive to the author.
huh? since when has that clause been appropriate? certianly not since copyright was bought out by disney to last indefinately. certianly not since the patent office began issuing vague software and business method patents. his argument rests on broken foundations. the us constitution is not a great foundation (its just the lesser evil compares to most other countries')
I can't agree with your statement on software obviosuly being pirated more if games shipped with source.
.0001% of game buyers willing to go through the bother of compiling a whole game certainly wouldn't hurt sales. Worried about someone compiling and releasing a binary of the game elsewhere? I though we already covered under piracy that anyone who wants one can get a copy of the ORIGINAL game, tested and virus-free (probably, of course it is Warez....).
Think of it this way - take your statement that there is "massive piracy" today. I'd agree, and in fact agree so wholeheartedly that I have to ask you: If someone wants a pirated copy of a game today, can they not get one easily? In fact the only way it would be easier to pirate games is if they shipped to your door on AOL CD's. Thus, how could ppiracy increase by releasing source?
Next consider a company releasing source for a product on thier website, but selling binaries and disallowing anyone else to distribute binaries. How would that hurt sales? The
Of course where a company might loose out is that other companies would download and use the engine without paying them for it. On ther other hand, it might lead to a larger community around your product, and also get a few more people into game programming which is good for industry as a whole. I'll bet a lot of people have benefitted from the release of Quake and Quake II code to the public at large.
ID probably has the perfect balance between OS and a commercial company that can still make money on engines.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Suppose the petition is in place and I want to experiment with a modification to the DSSP algorithm. ... The easiest way to do that is to get the DSSP source code and make the needed changes. The new code almost certainly contains parts of the old code, so under the DSSP license it cannot be redistributed. This means I cannot release the software under an open source license, and so I cannot do this research under a publicly funded grant. Either I find a private grant, rewrite DSSP completely, or simply not do that science. In any case, it hinders my research.
He makes it sound like the only hindrance that happens is in the petition world, but the whole problem is that the publically funded/closed source research allows this secondary problem to continue.
Either private actors would step in, or the DSSP people would release their code under a more liberal license so public money could be used in projects where it was useful. It's that simple.
If there were a push for openness, the patented algorithm would more obviously be the only *remaining* hindrance.
It's like saying "we can't remove this first barricade because the second one is still standing, so you'll continue having to fly a helicopter over this stretch of road." Good for helicopter rental companies, bad for science.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
i pay my taxes to use the roads, i pay taxes to be protected by the military, I pay taxes for access to schools and if my taxes are paying for this research, then damned, i want access to it to.
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
You completely miss the point of the original poster. You suggest that making source code available will make a program more likely to be pirated. How?
I burn a copy of a Windows CD which contains no source code.
I burn a copy of a Windows CD which contains the full source code.
How is the latter worse than the former? How does the latter increase the losses to the publisher?
The suggestion is NOT that the publisher make source code available FOR FREE TO EVERYONE. The suggestion is that if you buy a copy of the binary, you receive also a copy of the source code. This makes the software neither more nor less piratable. Reverse engineering is a different issue.
Note that the first amendment conflicts with copyright. Your artist's rights to prevent me from publishing text is a violation of my right to freedom of the press.
Argument by analogy is a logical fallacy...One word: communism.
Straw man is also a logical fallacy.
I'd give you an F if you turned this in in my class...
No. The public domain is anathema to copyright. Works which are in the public domain are specifically devoid of copyright. Copyright is intended to allow a work to be available to the public, while simultaneously allowing the author to profit.
This is already the law with respect to all copyrighted works, including computer programs.
It also turns out to be nearly unenforcable with respect to computer programs or other works stored on electronic media. In 1800, it was very hard to copy a map: either you painted it by hand or you you carved it into a printing plate. In 2000, its very easy to copy software: you click-and-drag. This is especially true for 'open source' software, which has traditionally been no cost software.
This may be the root of the matter. On the one hand, it's important that creators profit. This requires that people who benefit from the work pay for it (if the author so desires). On the other hand, all the schemes we know about to effect that payment are based on it being relatively difficult to reproduce a work. I hope the solution we find is not software rental: I hate the prospect of paying someone $0.02 every time I write a letter.
If it is any money that comes from the public at large, then wouldn't that also include tax dollars the gov't takes away from us all? So, if you don't agree that tax money = public money feel free to stop reading, are you saying that all programs written with federal tax money should be open-sourced? If so, I strongly disagree with you, I personally do not want anyone to build to view/modify/ and most importantly reuse say the guidecance system from my countries nuclear arms...
Just my two cents.
1)Fair
2)That's not really code, is it? Unless they are using Rule Buider TM.
3)Fair enough, you can't think of everything.
4)ALARM! This is not what your tax dollars should be supporting! This is the whole problem and what most of us are resentful over. I'm not giving research money to my competitors.
5)This again is not code.
6)This agian is not code.
7)This again is not code.
8)This again is not code.
9)This again is not code.
So the only thing the federal government is not allowed to tell us are matters of national security, and private information that regulating common resources (banks, oil wells) requires them to be trusted with. It looks like all code not used for military purposes is fair game, unless we invent stupid laws to defeat ourselves.
The whole notion of not disclosing your code is stupid and greedy. If you want to be a software firm, do it, and good freaking luck. If you want to be a researcher, you had better come clean with your methods. If you have developed some codes that you want to use, but don't want to make free (that's not what research is all about), OK, but you had better make coppies available so that others can repeat your results and prove it works. But don't try to milk the public to develop private code. Fill up your time as you pleas, but don't put code you have not intention of sharing in your grant.
Sorry for the rant folks, I'm not in a good mood.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I agree. There has been so many times when I just wonder how to do something. Usually it's something quite simple, like say automating the configuration of some feature.
This is already the law with respect to all copyrighted works, including computer programs.
Agreed, although I believe that interpretation has been lost. It certainly has amongst the GPL crowd who now feel that they should have an inherent right to copy and redistribute without limits.
If you own a book, you have the right to read it, regardless of whether you bought the book from the publisher, borrowed it from the library, or bought it on eBay.
Agreed, although to clarify if you have a book only one person can read it at a time. I was primarily thinking of selling to corporations who have multiple people utilizing it at once. Actually even in homes, if you have multiple computers and the two children both want to play the same game... you need two copies. It'd be the same with any other game, book, music, video whatever. Unless they are willing to share and play the one copy together.
Most software is packaged on distribution CDs, so the physical-copy copyright model remains valid and functional.
Except these concepts don't apply as well to software which is downloaded off the Internet, which is becoming more and more common. Honestly I don't like it, as I'd rather have a physical CD, but you don't have much choice these days.
Agreed. I'd go so far as to say that useful change to copyright can best be accomplished by returning to the purposes that it was designed to serve.
Absolutely. It's unfortunate, however, that such enlightened opinions generally get lost in the noise that is slashdot.org. :-)
I'm asking. I really don't know. However I imagine that they are faced with very similar issues. If Cal or Davis or UCSF or any other public school finds an invaluable new drug formula through a government funded project do they release the research and/or the formula to the public? Can we find any precedence in them?
I also suspect that many of those med projects have multiple funding sources. If this is true and some of those sources are private interests, what then?
I understand that medical science has some unique rules but what about the article posted not so long ago about software driven pacemakers. I think that is a perfect industry bridge example. What do they do in those cases?
Perhaps some of the readers in the med community wouldn't mind answering.
I do programming for a research institute with public money. Do you really want to see my code and how crappy it is? Ick. Maybe I'll have to start commenting...
This subject has been heavily debated already for well over 2 decades. Why not check it out the web?
As only source code can be GPL'd, then of COURSE you have to give a copy to someone in order to give it to them under GPL.. not sure what your point is.
Who is talking about claiming to release software without releasing anything?
THe previous post made it sound like the author of code is bound by the terms of the GPL.. he is not.. the GPL specifies nothing in terms of obligations of the original author.
Thanks for your posting. Very informative and well written. I had never heard of the notion of exclusive rights implying the obligation to publish. Makes a lot of sense.
As much as I like the purist idea of everything being open, a lot of money HAS been sunk into development of this code. And not just by the public.
I'd say give the university a couple years to shop the discovery around to try and recoup some of the money that went into the project.
Then, when the grace period expires, the original source code would be BSD'ed or GPL'ed or both, and released.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
A work in the public domain can be copied freely by anyone. Such works include those of the U.S. Government and works for which the copyright has expired.
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/library/faq.html
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
It might be worth noting that there *is* a large amount of publicly funded software available from universities, government organizations and even corporate contractors paid to develop that code. Frankly, a lot of it is not terribly useful outside the specific niche for which it was developed. (I personally have little use for Fortran weather models)
I would agree that it is repugnant for a researcher to develop something with public funding, patent it and then go on to make a fortune on it... But often (at least in some branches of scence) this is a condition for the research to be undertaken at all.
Having a (small) bit of experiencein this area, one of the most common problems in making publicly funded research available is the combination of packaging and support. I have often found that code is available if you can figure out who to ask and what to ask for! Yes, the public paid $10,000 for a chunk of code relating to enzyme identification, but no one is willing to fund a perpetual $5,000 per year for someone to package, publish and support the software. Further, doing so is NOT part of the mission of the researchers that worked on it. Ask Linus Torvalds or Larry Wall what the investment in tie and effort is to package and support a large package...
All that said, I would dearly love to see a little more ethical and less greedy approach to patents by anyone with public funding. I would also dearly like to see the government do a little better job of tracking and packaging the research/software assets that it has. (Kudos to the many individual researchers who ARE making an effort to share what they or their labs have created!)I still won't care about Fortran weather models, but I would feel better knowing that if I did, I could find out how many the government has developed, and where/how to get them.
Does anyone have any ideas about how the practical issues of publiching "public" code might be dealt with?
I don't have a problem with the creators of "I.P." setting the price for the work that goes into their creation. I do have a problem with them having ever-increasing rights to control subsequent reproduction of that work by others. Copyright was NOT intended to be an eternal magic-money-making machine for corporations. The problem is that the "I.P." laws are clearly favouring the content creator over the public good at this stage, thanks to things like the DMCA.
I'm also willing to bet that that majority of such code written today with money from the U.S. Governement is done on projects that the U.S. Government has no consitutional right to be involved in - say, all the software that "became the Internet", or software to support research into the airspeed of an unladen swallow..
The general exception to this rule, is development of software to lower government costs. For example, software that enables government to produce legislation for less money (not that I want to encourage more legislation), would be reasonable to develop. Of course, they ought to be using an existing Word Processor for that one. Or software related to national defense.
David Corbin Promote Freedom - American Liberty Foundation
for example the huge industry of Western movies, most of which showed the viewpoint that it was moral to invade someone else's land, and kill them if they resisted. General Custer wanted to commit genocide - he was prevented from doing so when he found that there were men there, not just women and children. Yet he has been made out to be a hero by hollywood!
I thought builders had to *pay* to look at building regulations in california (previous slashdot article)
Inland Revenue :-)
Of course if you live in a different country this may not help much
AFAIK, the main reason expensive equipment isn't made open for anyone to use is that it usually already has a full schedule for research. But a software tool can be made open to the public and the researchers can still do their job. There is also the added advantage of external bug fixes.
I think this kind of open code would really speed science along, due to reduced duplicated effort. If there is private source that can't be opened up because it's from a third party then don't release that code. Obviously it won't work with out the closed library but it can still be learned from.
if you use this medium "customarily", yes. but how much info goes on a punch card? For a large project i think you need you millions dollars just to put it on puch cards. And than you have to ship it to Paris (a five hour ride from here, but a very expensive trip from the usa.).
Just close-source it (find a little bit of private funding, like your mother) and ask the million.
Since public funds paid for US army F-16's, I demand my right as one of the public to fly one of those babies.
I'd like to press the red button on a couple of nukes too.
Can you give an example? I know of several companies who donated PCs to the department where I studied CS, but there was certainly no such restriction on the department as a result. Actually, one of the department's staff quipped in his first lecture that while MS would like to think it was in partnership with the department, the department didn't necessarily share that view.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Since all government research is publicly funded, let's open source all our developments so that our enemies can have all of the advances we make without any of the cost! Sounds great! Are you stupid or working for the Chineese?
I think very few people here have actually stopped and thought about this, read the arguments cited, or formed any sort of informed opinion, before posting. It's interesting to note that the arguments from those here with experience in research labs are vastly better informed and reasoned than the average.
First of all, can we stop being so US-centric, please? Most of you are associating "public" money (as funded by a particular government to a particular organisation) with "public" results (as in, open to everyone, everywhere). For most of you, your taxes did not pay for research done where I was studying, because I'm in a different country to most of you. Why should your world-bashing corporations get the benefit from my tax money?
BTW, here in the UK, academics are generally pretty open with their findings to anyone who's interested. I have had interesting and informative conversations with people who wouldn't no me from Adam, except that I shared an interest in their area of research. After all, most went into that research area because it interests them, too. I've had all sorts of source code, algorithms and such sent to me from many sources, just by asking. So the whole argument about things being restricted and the whole world being commercialised is just FUD, I'm afraid. Just because it's not widely published and/or advertised doesn't mean it's not available to those with a legitimate interest.
The people who've pointed out that the majority of academic research is not entirely, or even mostly, public-funded are also spot on. There are many people with vested interests, and any sort of completely open result is only ever going to be practical with completely open input (i.e., equal contributions from everyone, everywhere). Clearly that doesn't happen in practice.
Finally, what's GPL got to do with this? I can see arguments on merit for releasing openly funded material openly, though I happen to feel that they're outweighed for the reasons above. However, I see no justification whatsoever for releasing the results under some arbitrary licence that some people just happen to like, when that licence itself imposes restrictions on others.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"So the only thing the federal government is not allowed to tell us are matters of national security"
Which conveniently covers anything they want to pull out of their ass that day. "National security" is a crock. In a democracy the *people* are the national security.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Well, I'd also agree that software created using public money should be placed into the public domain.
But, playing the devils advocate for a moment, what about other countries? After all, the americans paid for system X, why should, say, the EU get it for free?
Thus: Public Domain for US citizens and companies, a reasonable fee for all others. Sure you could circumvent it somewhat, but at least it would be fairer.
Ciao,
Klaus
PS: Yes, I live in the EU.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
The modifications to those source-available non-open source products could be put in a patch, and that patch could then be put under a BSD license (allowing the owner of the original software, as well as other users, to benefit).
If the license of the original product allows distribution of patches, that is. If they don't, then it might well be reasonable to have an exception, such that all code generated with public funds that can legally be released in an open source fashion must be. - If it can't legally be released, then don't release it. If it can be, it should have to be.
Currently I am working on beginning a relationship with a university. They are looking to sell a program that was funded up to this point by mostly public money. Personally, I would like to see the program become open source, but considering their potential customer base (other universities and private research institutions) it may be difficult for them to get money if it is open source. The decision that needs to be made is more functionality over income. Many of their clients could become developers of the project, but they could be losing revenue.
I have a meeting with them on Thursday. I may throw out the words, "Open Source," and see what happens.
As a recent graduate, I have seen first hand an increasing shift of universities towards becoming profit centers (shouldn't have used the 'p' word... revenue centers). This unfortunately can reduce the level of innovation, but at the same time can increase the immediate utility of the end product.
not too long ago i wanted to obtain the final
report on a government-sponsored project
(about whether magnesium hydride could substitute
for NiMH in rechargeable batteries at ambient
temperature/pressure).
no go, because the research was *partially*
funded by a private enterprise (s. ovshinsky's
company ENER). the grant overseers steered
me towards verbiage like:
http://www.atp.nist.gov/atp/kit-00/cahpt1.htm
whereby, even given u.s. govt. "cost-sharing",
a private contributor can retain *all*
patent/publication rights.
this struck me as a bit different than my days
working for the space agency, when all sorts
of private-sector contractors, participants from
academia, etc. could contribute towards a very public effort.
yes, many NASA contractors made derivatives of govt.-funded
work become eventually proprietary,
but at least the initial results could be
publicly inspected to see what
the taxpayer helped to fund.
http://www.atp.nist.gov/atp/kit-00/chapt1.htm
memo to those who use my money for their research. if i pay for it, i own it. if you don't like it; there's no gun pointed at your head. no one if forcing you to do your reasearch.
how about we just cut off your funding until this whole issue is resolved?
Frankly I don't buy the arguement that it would be too difficult due to currently using proprietary software and that much would have to be redone from scratch as an exuse to not require publicly funded research to release their works in an open format.
Code is powerful, and we don't want a situation where you have to mortgage your house in order to recieve medical help{as it exist today}
--If you have your health, you are rich
YHBT
I thought I understood trolling when I was younger, but I didn't really seem to understand your form. You see, when I trolled it was utter nonsense, and anybody getting truely riled up by it looked like an idiot.
Minus the "I'm the tasty treat nobody can resists" (I should have known picked it up from there) it seems like you're form of trolling offers some purpose as people are often presented with arguments like the one you presented with failed logic.
It's almost like you're turning Slashdot into a game where you present a flawed, but somewhat believable argument, and the rest of us are aiming to refute it as concisely and quickly as possible, without sounding like your blowing too much hot air. Pretty clever...
...OR...
Is your troll the kind that teaches us to ignore stupid posts? (Hence, the THWACK)
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
No. The public domain is anathema to copyright.
... like saying that free people are anathema to slavery.
What a strange statement
If the public domain is such a bad thing, and copyrights are such a good thing, then why did the authors of the Constitution specifically require that copyrights expire? Why create an obligation to turn a good thing into a bad thing?
The answer is that monopolies are really the "bad thing", . They were considered dangerous and destructive to the drafters of the Constitution. There was considerable debate as to whether monopolies should be permitted at all. One of the bitter lessons learned by the colonists from England was the danger of permitting government to grant monopolies to individuals.
Copyright is intended to allow a work to be available to the public, while simultaneously allowing the author to profit.
Copyright is intended to incite publication. That is the end. That is the public benefit.
In exchange for the public benefit of the work being published and available for the general public to read and learn from, copyright creates conditions that allow the author to profit.
You have it exactly backwards. Copyright is the means to achieve a better public domain.
In 1800, it was very hard to copy a map: either you painted it by hand or you you carved it into a printing plate.
Have you ever heard of tracing paper? Lithography?
If you think publicly funded reasearch should open source, then you should add that individuals should have a non-compete that they cannot leave a university and start a company with research from their university
Sun microsystems
Netscape
Platinum software
need more?
You would do well to perform a bit of research on the subject at hand. Even so, your arguments are rather weak. Let's take a look at them.
o ft /
o ft /cert/library-amicus.pdf
3 9
[JC] "Would programmers' software be pirated more or less if every program were open source (but still sold commercially)? MORE! "
I disagree.
[JC] "The existence of warez to the level it is today would indicate to any observer that a huge number of people are willing to steal this software. "
Maybe they are, maybe they are not. This has nothing to do with the question.
[JC] "Open-sourcing everything would increase piracy. "
Here you repeat your belief, and again fail to justify it. I could easily argue that people are more happy to pirate binaries than source code. How many of the people who pirate, say, Windows, know how to use a compiler, let alone build an operating system or would even care to if the binaries were available?
[JC] "If more people are pirating the software, **how are the authors' rights being protected**? They are NOT being protected in this situation..."
(rest of Slippery Slope edited out)
Moving onto the next one...
[JC] "The framers do recognize that it is important for the public to be able to benefit from these works, but not at the expense of the individual! "
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" [U.S. Const. art I, sec. 8, cl. 8]
Notice the word "limited". It is very important. I'm not sure how you take "limited" to imply that the framers' intentions were never to have the public domain expand "at the expense of the individual".
There are people who can argue this much better than I. See:
http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/eldredvashcr
And in particular, read (PDF):
http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/eldredvashcr
pages 4 and onwards, "ARGUMENT":
"I. The Court Of Appeals Ignored The Original Intent Of The Framers That The Limited Monopoly Provided By Copyright Should Be Consistent With The Preservation Of A Vibrant Public Domain
"II. The DC Circuit's Decision Harms The Public Interest In Copyright Law By Minimizing The Public Domain
(for context, see web site)
I would also like to make the suggestion that you live in what is known as "society". This means that there are other people out there sharing this planet with you, most of whom who would like to have a better quality of life. Many people are quick to mention that competition is an integral part of evolution. For some reason they are quick to forget that symbiosis is just as important. Indeed, if every bit of code ever produced had never been shared (just as if every organism had somehow never allowed itself to form the basis for some other organism), we would not have the world we do today. While in biology this is an unrealistic proposition, humans find themselves with choice in the former situation. I think people like you would make the wrong choice.
Copyright is an incentive to produce in society; a necessary part of being in a society, however, is working together--here, sharing.
I'll direct you to one last (free) story whose premise all computer scientists will probably have little difficulty grasping:
"Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson
http://www.tale.com/titles-free.phtml?title_id=
(Well, it's free if you don't want to pay for it. It's your choice.)
- dsakfl
dcorbin, I agree with you almost, with the inevitable *but* ...
...), but let's say that's not going to happen this evening.
...
:) I'd also like to see a big red pen start slashing through the various acronyms which misspend our money, corrupt the country, subvert the Constitution, etc .. .
- *but* there are government bodies currently producing code. Better that they should dry up and blow away (the ones not contributing to my defense, increasing my liberty, etc, and I figure that will take care of 90% at least
I'd rather they *at least* in the meantime have to turn over the work done under contract to the sponsors (taxpayers / the general public)
At that's a strong "at least"
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Of course the law favours the content creator over the 'public good'. The public is just a collection of individuals, and in this case, divided by being a content creator and a content copier. If the law favoured those not the content creators, than the only ones benefiting are those who did nothing to make the product or pattern, or code useful in the first place. Those who created the idea should have complete control over its use, and not have to suffer because some one finds it cheaper to steal his idea instead of compensating him for its use.
Should there be anything in my \tmp directory when I first install?
Calm down, it's *only* ones and zeroes.