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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.
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 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.
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
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!
We are not talking about not being able to benefit from the product of publicly funded projects. We are talking about whether you need to see the source code in order to enjoy the benefits. I can see cases where companies pull their products out of a university out of fear of it being open-sourced.
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 ---
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
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
Having worked in a research lab, I can tell you that who paid for what is often very, very unclear.
Consider a researcher has a research program that has been going for 20 years. He may have been funced at various times by: a) the university (often academic researchers start work on the university's dime), b) government grants, c) private foundation grants, d) his own money. His graduate students may have been supported by any of those various sources or independent scholarship sources. Perhaps a tuition-paying undergraduate contributed some code at some time also.
Just like research equipment, code also accumulates. It may have been traded from other research groups. It is a real mess. Figuring out who owns what can be more or less impossible unless you have a dedicated ground-up code block that is identifiable to a project that has no contributions from anything other than public funding. (Oops, you have a Hertz fellow write 2,000 lines of the 100,000 lines of code... now what?)
Odds are that there are already too many rules regarding the code. Adding another one is just going to bollix up an already intractable mess.
I'm having trouble following your statement, although I'll give you a break since English may be a second language for you.
From what I gather, your point is, GPL'ed code needs to be cloned and re-released under a BSD-style license in order to be used in non-GPL projects, so why not just release under BSD-style license in the first place?
Well, the argument is that there is a problem where public-funded code is taken proprietary and used in a way that doesn't benefit the people who foot the bill. BSD-style licenses do not prevent this.
Perhaps what's needed is a dual licence. Code is released under the GPL and BSD licenses, and you end up with one branch that is guaranteed free forever (the GPL'ed branch) and another branch that can be intermixed with proprietary code. That way, the fruits of a public-funded project are available to everyone, but those who want to take it proprietary may also do so.
Oh CHRIST - you're quite the whiner huh?
You're probably the same type of person that, when pulled over for a speeding ticket, berates the cop with "Hey! You can't do this to me - I PAY your salary!"
Guess what - some tax dollars go to develop stuff that you don't use or get benefits from. Deal with it. The american technology industry wouldn't be nearly what it is if it wasn't for the investment made by the military and/or government. Do you directly get some cash out of the deal? No. But society as a whole benefits from the advancement.
Next time you're in florida, i suggest you stop by NASA and *demand* your trip on the space shuttle. After all, you 'paid for it'.
(this argument is of course orthogonal to the one about what projects are 'appropriate' to fund. Don't try to pull us off on a tangent)
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?
The money belongs to the People, dammit! So should the research.
Usually only the results of the research belong to the people. You can have *free* access (well, may be you need to pay for a journal subscription) to published results. As you have probably realized, you don't have free access to a molecular genetics lab, a radiotelescope, a cyclotron or any of the tools funded by public money. You do have access to a piece of paper (or pdf file) with the description of the project and its results. Why software should be different?
Do you peer review when someone is building up a cyclotron? Do you even peer review scientific publication? I think the *obligation* to publish your source code is silly, and it is stopping many people to do real work in platforms that require so. If someone wants to publish the code great, but if they don't want to do it it is not a big deal. As someone paying taxes I do not care if the software is open source or not, only if the *results* (not every tool you needed to complete it) of the research are useful and available.
>
'There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately useless' - Jorge Luis Borges
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An important point that may have been missed:
:-). Oooh, I'm evil :-)
It's not the fact that the government is paying researchers to develop some wonderful thing that they then go off and own completely. The government always retains rights FOR GOVERNMENT PURPOSES -- usually to everything, including source code, design drawings, what have you.
Now, they can't just turn around, take the source code, and give it to the public, but they can re-use it for any government purpose. I believe they can even give it to another government contractor to do government things. It isn't as bleak as is made out.
An argument can also be made that exclusive commercial rights are used as an incentive to get more people to step up to the plate and bid on various research proposals. I work for a R&D shop that gets funds from the government, and while I suspect we would probably be fine if we had to give away code, we certainly try to make commercial use of what we build (only sometimes successfully
Finally, a lot of people don't realize it, but the government LIKES it when people have an incentive to commercialize things. $300 toilet seats aside, the government would MUCH RATHER just go out and buy some COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) technology than pay to have it developed. If the company they give the R&D funds to can commercialize a product and get it on the GSA schedule, the government frequently considers that a job well done. This may happen just as quickly with open source, but I don't think that's been proven yet.
Finally, there are a whole class of things for which (at least initially) the government might not see a commercial use for, AND the contractor might not either [some strange intelligence application, or weird battlefield piece of hardware, for instance]. If the government can say "and if you find a commercial use for this, you can have it", more people may be interested in scratching their heads over the problem enough to respond to an RFP or bid on a proposal.
Bah!
Code, television shows and some works of art are ALL different to most forms of property!
Most forms of property have a physical existence and are not infinitely copyable. They are called "naturally scarce" in the jargon. If I take your car, you don't have it anymore.
Code, television shows, music, films, and the written word, are all simply patterns of information, that ARE infinitely copyable. They are "non-scarce".
Our current social structure sometimes creates "artificial scarcity" out of certain "non-scarce" abstact things like patterns of information - one such artificially scarce social construct is (mis)named "intellectual property".
Unlike real, physical property, you can give me a copy of the underlying information pattern without destroying your own copy, at what is practially near-zero energy/cost. Thus, it is FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT to most things contemporary society badges "property".
One of the things that is happening now is that Joe Soap on the street has non-scarce access to increasing numbers of goods that are currently of merely artificially scarce statys, such as: digital music, films, etc., as well as program code.
The old megacorporations which relied on keeping such patterns of information artificially scarce for their business model are now fighting desperately to keep them that way, while millions of Joe Soaps move to bypass them in copying the non-scarce information patterns.
Remember, intellectual property is only a societal convention - if millions upon millions of people start to ignore it, then bulk society has changed, and the very concept of I.P. is obsolete in its current form - Would you have sided with the scribes when the printing press was invented? Will you side with the factory workers when/if nanotech renders physical items effectively non-scarce, and the factories become obsolete? How about when/if the march of programs effectively eliminates energy/matter scarcity altogether, and things like money and present-day economic systems like communism and capitalism all become obsolete? It could happen, and lots of people are already thinking about it - see Iain Banks' "Culture" novels.
Yes, the abandonment of the profit motive might result in less code/music/films. But personally, having seen the quality of today's code/music/films, I'm one of those people of the view that the best ones will still be made - since the best ones tend not to be made solely for profit.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
This subject's scope is significantly past software.
The issue here is any public funds that are used to subsidize the research of a corporate entity in which the results of the public investment just adds to the corporate IP portfolio. When this happens how is the public served?
Case in point: You get seriously ill and you need state of the art medication. It cost some drug company 40 cents to manufacture it per dose. The drug company charges 60 dollars per dose to the consumer. The research was paid for with public funds. The profit goes to the company. The public gets screwed. I am sure that one can find other examples of this, and I am sure they are equally outrageous.
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.
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
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.
Actually, as much as I like the GPL I think that a BSD style license should be applied to ALL work produced by our colleges and universities.
While some people bristle at the "restrictions" of BSD style licenses, primarily that credit be given to the author(s) of the work in the Source Code, I would argue that this "restriction" is one that is commonly found in all other areas of academia. When you write a paper based on someone else's research, it is customary to cite other papers, by author, that you based your research on. Why should writing code be any different.
Perhaps the easiest way to start would be for the NSF, as a requirement for grant money, stipulate that all work produced as a result of this grant be released under a BSD style license.
I would suggest that it shouldn't come as any surprise that University research be governed by a BSD style license, after all where did BSD originate? At the UNIVERSITY of California, Berkley.
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)