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Free as in Marketable?
An anonymous reader asks: "I work in IT at a research university. A few of my co-workers and I are in the process of planning a piece of software that we would like to release to the public under the GPL license, but we're running into issues with our "intellectual property" office which thinks we have a potentially marketable product. We would rather give the product away for free and see our university get some credit for the product. How have others dealt with this problem? It's a shame that money is more important to a research school than sharing research with others."
What about putting it under something else than the GPL? What about puttting it under a license that makes it free for non-commercial and educational use but requires payment if used in a commercial setting or sold? That would probably keep the suits happy.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Sure, it sucks, but what do you expect? Research universities are all about the money- why do you think they're so well funded? Why do you think they do that research? Because they do research that in some percentage of the time produces something they can make a return on. Universities don't get rich off that 48.5% they get in overhead off an NSF grant... Yes, that pays the bills, but project commercialization and subsequent profit is what pays for expansion of programs and physical conquest as well as for all the non-profitable research going on.
It seems like shitty thing, especially when you're youngue and impressionable- an undergrad or master's student with her head full of ideas about Freedom and Information Equality. I wish it was that way, but most people aren't willing to fund science for its own sake- they want a return on that investment.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Just because a project/product is GPL doesn't mean that you can't market it. There are lots of business models behind open source software, just ask the folks at RedHat or Zend. Lowering the barriers to adoption by making distribution essentially free (cost of bandwidth) and no up-front expense is a great marketing tool, actually. Ask your university's marketroid advocates the following question: would RedHat and/or PHP be here today and be the most popular tools of their kind, if they had to reach their userbase by traditional marketing means and expenditures?
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
- Be a large company that can affort to market the heck out of your products. (ie the current capitalist method).
- Be a niche developer selling a useful product to a small market. This usually works for a solitary developer. The market won't be big enough to support much more than that.
- Really target a niche market hard - Mathematica, Matlab. This is almost an extension of the first category, cause its still all about marketing.
- Be a small group of friendly talented developers who labor for love. (I'm thinking OmniGroup here)
- Do some sort of value added open source thing. The profits are probably directly proportional to the marketing muscle.
No software will be perfect, therefore, no software will sell itself. Unless your university plans on making the financial risk of targeted advertising, the money just won't come. Ask them to generate a plan on how they intend to sell your software. If they won't commit, then give them some examples of the last category (sleepycat, apache, mysql, zope, etc.)sean
Its easy to force or make it very difficult not to release the source of a project once you are the coder. The easyest way is to link in a few GPL librarys (LibBFD is my favorite in this area) and make their use so essential that the software cannot be unbundled from them. Then state that if the product is to be released to the public it has to be open sourced due to its use of GPL'd librarys. Doesn't stop you writing it but if the university wants to distribute it then it needs to open it.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
I've been in this situation before, on several different projects. Getting something through the intellectual property office, or whatever your version of it is called, is a complete nightmare.
Since the internet boom, universities have been looking at software with an eye towards making money from about anything they could. I avoid that office until I absolutely can't.
Anyway....
First, is this something related to what you're doing at work? Did you come up with it, and work on it at work? If you didn't, they shouldn't be able to touch it. (insert standard "I'm not a lawyer, check with one of you're worried" disclaimer here).
If you did work on it at work, I seriously doubt this is something you can win, since you did use their resources to create it. I was never able to. The best I came up with was copyright by the university, free for non-commercial use. If someone uses it commercially, they have to obtain a license from the university.
A couple of tips:
1) First, hound the lawyers. I don't mean daily, but I do mean at least once every couple of weeks. If you don't, your release form will go to the bottom of the pile and you'll wait months and months. That's because there are many other people trying to get their patents, licenses, etc. approved. Be nice, friendly, but persistent. You'll need a good contact there in case someone actually does ask for the commerical license.
2) Don't expect to actually sell a commerical license. I've had many requests for commercial licenses, and none of them panned out. We charge about $3000 for the code (which is very cheap, if you compare it to the commerical world), and no further fees, but no one touched it.
3) If you accept changes from the outside to the code base you're maintaining, make it clear that it's under this license. The license should probably state something like that. This will make the lawyers feel better.
4) If at ALL possible, see if you can get a general license approved, that you can use to send out stuff that you'll come up with later. You'll still have to run it by the lawyers, but it'll take much less time.
5) If you're aware of any other software project that's gone through this before, find those folks, and ask them about all this. They might have something you can use to make the lawyers feel better. You might end up being this person if you're the one blazing the trail at your University. I know our license ended up being used by other projects after people consulted with me.
6) If you have no idea what to put in a license like this, look around at other universities that have released code like this, run it by the lawyers and see what they say.
7) This isn't really related to the license, but worth doing. Set up something to count the number of downloads you get on your software. Set up a mailing list too. If someone tries to axe the project because "no one uses it", you'll have ammo for that argument.
Good luck with all this. It's a real pain, but if you get a community behind your project to support you, it's worth it.
people are allowed to view the source code and use the software if they are students or universities. If they are businesses or freelancers they must pay a fee for each licence.
Once its out... it can't be retracted. What will they do then
There's nothing that I'm aware of that says that you can't SELL open source software.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
And I am not a big corporate donor. I am a taxpayer. Depending on the state, I likely paid for that software to be written; I underwrite tuition at the university; the university was founded with a land appropriation, which if left private could have made my grandfather rich; a variety of special provisions by the state legislature give this university a wide class of special exemptions and preferences.
This is not Bell Labs or Xerox Parc, folks. *Those* are places that can whine about a return on investment.
And now my and my ancestor's investments in an educated society full of opportunity are being hijacked by lawyers and weak, cowardly, and greedy administration. The trustees and administrators of most universities in the US these days are a craven mafia eager to claim the public's infrastructure for themselves and set up a toll gate. These are the people who didn't make it on to the board of Enron and WorldCom because they were too untrustworthy.
Quit now. And LIGHT THE PLACE ON FIRE WHEN YOU LEAVE.
Nothing prevents you from selling closed-source versions of the same code you release GPL. You can provide official support or installation or manuals (no reason to release the good manuals with the GPL code). Or you can also add a few extensions of your own to the closed-source version so it has more value other than just official support.
The GPL version may be extremely useful for advertising your program. If it does anything useful you will find awareness of your program very high.
You can also copyright the name of the program in such a way that anybody forking a version is forced to change the name significantly so there is no way to confuse the two. If your name is considered "official" then that other version will have a hard time competing.
The problem is your IP department has been brainwashed into believing the GPL is bad for them. In some cases they are so stupid that they think it is worse than releasing the code public-domain. In fact unless you have millions of dollars in marketing budget, the GPL is the only method you have to make your product commercially viable. Microsoft is scared to death of this competition appearing which is why they are fighting it in every way they can, including posting some misleading letters here.
As much as I hate providing a compromise in this situation: Do as Trolltech: Release freely under an OpenSource license. Release under a commercial license for a fee. Make contributions back to your code repository can be relicensed. (n) Profit!!!?!?!?!?. ahem...
The large company method (Oracle, Borland, of course MS, etc) is probably out. These people will not buy that software from you. From the point of view of the MBA's who make the decision, anything written in a couple of years by a couple of guy's can be replicated (ok, half as good) by 50 Hindi's working for 1% the price each over 4 years, and given that actual software development is like 2% of the company's cost, the uncertainties of buying someone else's software (look at all the time MS has bought software that turned out to be pirated or under the BSD license), they just won't do it. These MBAs veiw you and and anything associated with you as shit and won't give you the time of day.
Now look at the niche market guy, particularly the one to five person shop. In this catagory you have 4 Developers (discriptive name), ACDsee (probably as big as these class ever gets, a 40 person company), Mondo rescue (hey, it's even open source!), Device Logics (milking the last bit of money out of DRDOS with a 3 person company). Folks, as programmers, that catagory is where the money is. Those programmers keep more of what they produce than anyone else in the industry. Their products are cheap, but ultimately the future is a few biggies like Oracle and Microsoft still conning the pointy-haireds who won't buy from anyone else, and a vast class of independent shops. Society will spend less on software, but paradoxically software programmers will get more money, because the vast and oppressive corporate bureaucracies will be starved out.
Those guys will never buy our man's University written software because they can't afford enough to pay the university lawyer's hourly rate while they look over the docs and sign them.
In short, Sean is right and this software will never make money.
UNLESS . . . our man quits his academic job and re-writes this and starts selling it himself. Which is of course exactly what he should do.
If the university is ever going to make any money of off this, they need you to help. They just don't have an in-house software shop that can take your code, fire you, and crunch it into a well oiled and QA'd product and provide tech support, etc. They need you to write it; they need you to use your expertise in what it does to market it, by finding the company that is willing to buy a commercial license to it; etc, etc.
Point them to the kermit project at Columbia university. You need to talk to your boss, department heads, whomever, and graciously make the point that the university is not going to make a red injun cent off of this if you are not happy.
Then tell them you think the best way to market it is to release a GPL'd edition, and advertise a separate closed source license for sale to a companyt that want's to commericially develop it.
Look around carefully and talk to friends, and find a company that makes vaguely similar products that is not a nasty place to work. Get in there, be persistent, seach the company phone directory until you make it past generic business contacts to the people who matter, and market it to them. Offer your services as a consultant on the side. Because in this economy, even if you are working for a univesity, it never hurts to have another job lined up on the side.
You should write the software and market the hell out of it. If it's true that your idea is a good one, you'll get rich. Quit your job, live off of dividends from your copious investments, and write all the give-it-away software you want.
If your idea isn't a good one, which just looking at the matter statistically is far more likely, then it doesn't matter whether you tried to sell it or give it away. Poo is poo.
Problem solved.
I should assume you have read this document buts ity.html
I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere:
(Releasing Free Software if you work at a University)
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/univer
Hope this helps.
Ciaran O'Riordan
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Gee, uh, how much research do you think that research school of yours will be able to do without any bling-bling?
Like it or not, giving away software doesn't usually fall under research. If they're paying your salary, suck it up and deal with it.
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
I ran into this issue at Oxford University, which lays claim to potentially marketable IP produced by its students (which includes myself). Talking to the Research Services Office, however, I explained that being able to distribute my work was critical for the success of my research, and they agreed that "a university member's research must take priority over any commercial benefit"; once I put together a copyright statement which disclaimed all liability -- several times -- they were quite happy to let me distribute my work.
In short, if this is research, it's quite likely that the university will allow you to distribute it regardless of the official policies; but if you were hired for the purpose of writing a piece of software... well, it belongs to the university and they can do whatever they like with it.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
One way to have avoided this problem in the first place is to make use of the adage "If you don't want no for an answer, don't ask". I have seen many research groups at my university go ahead and release software under the GPL without ever asking the lawyers. I have never heard of any problems resulting from this tactic. But if the suits ever did get mad at you, you can just say "Hey, I didn't realize that this software was commercially viable. No problem, we can still sell a closed source version!".
the LGPL might be a more appropriate license if the product could be commercially viable.
Who is this "Poster" guy and why does he own all of my comments?!?
We've come to a similar conclusion at the research institution I work for, however it requires more advanced planning. If we're doing something that we want to release as open source, we get the sponsors to write a letter saying that they want such and such software that we're working on released as open source because it will help advance research in that area, makes it easier for us to collaborate with our peers at other institutions, etc.
Repeat after me: The person holding the purse strings is always right. And the intelectual property office recognises this.
-"Zow"
Forcing the hand of the "intellectual property" office sounds somewhat more convenient than having to compromise with them. The IP department is a group that should actually understand copyright law and thus why they would have no other option.
Even though I am firmly in the free software camp you need an imperfect solution to an imperfect problem, dual license it, give it to the school under a BSD like license so that they could take their version proprietary and then release it gpl style to the rest of us.
Use GPLed code in your code - then your code can only be released under GPL. If your University tried to sell this software they would be breaching the license conditions under which you initially used someone elses GPLed code (ie they would be breaching copyright).
Oh aren't you the clever one. Try reading the damn GPL and checking out the GPL FAQ first. Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?
So you need to put something in the other pan of the scales - something which will advantage the University from an OS release.
Presumably this software is (a) useful for your research, or you wouldn't have written it, (b) useful to others, because somebody thinks there is an outside chance of selling it, and (c) not bug free, because no software is ever bug free.
In my opinion, good, well documented bug reports are of value in their own right. My eexperience is that if someone provides a clean, repeatable bug report, the bug can usually be fixed in less than a day. Getting the bug to "repeatable" status can take many painful days of work. Therefore the presence of a body of users who provide quality reports, even if they never actually look at the code (and some will not only do so, they will submit patches) is a real, positive, benefit to the software - which, we have already said, is of benefit to your research, whish is what you are really paid for.
So you have three scenarios:
In short - play the accountants at their own game. Tell them why it benefits your research to release the source. The fact that it also benefits the world is a non-cash benefit to you - you can feel all warm and comfortable about the good you have done.
Very, very few of these "we might be able to sell it" options ever come off. So they would be trading a 50% chance of help with your research (with no downside) against a 1% chance of making significant bucks from the software (with the possibility of losing significant bucks instead).
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
The arguments that convinced them to allow me to go forward were about the business aspects of trying to market the software. When would the company make a firm decision to move forward on marketing it? Who would pay for the marketing effort? Who would pay to develop documentation, training materials and all the other things that went into supporting a product? Who would pay for ongoing maintenance to fix user-reported problems? Which organization would take on those jobs (I was in research and was going to stay there, it wouldn't be me)?
Once they realized that the company wasn't in the software product business, and wasn't going to be in that business, they were willing to listen to me about the non-monetary benefits of distributing the software.