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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."
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
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.
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.