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

Add a few librarys

[brejc8]

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.