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."

Comments

Getting your project out into the world....

[deanj]

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.

Re:Make money?!

[tha_mink]

Does anyone besides Microsoft actually make money strictly selling software? The way I see it, there are only a few ways to make money in the biz:

That's pretty ignorant so I assume you've got to be kidding. This is so much more software getting sold "out there" than you know about. Just becasue it doesn't come in a box at "best buy" doesn't mean that there isn't someone making copious amounts of money off of it. Plus a "potentially marketable" product could be anything. Maybe this dude wrote some software for a miniture assembly line and it could be sold to assembly line vendors, you have no idea.

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.
WTF? Lots of software sells itself simply by filling a void.

Sean is right

[Anonymous Coward]

Most software written is not written for distribution and sale. It is written in house, or by contractors, for the business's direct use, and any sort of copyright system whatsoever will never effect it because it will never be copied. You know, kind of like how this project in question probably started.

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.

have you read the FSF doc about this?

[ciaran_o_riordan]

I should assume you have read this document but
I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere:
(Releasing Free Software if you work at a University)
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/univers ity.html

Hope this helps.
Ciaran O'Riordan

Oxford University

[cperciva]

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.