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Free as in Marketable?

Posted by Cliff on from the faculty-politics-and-open-source dept.

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."

1 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. *I* want a return on *my* investment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.